Ill

I'm exhausted.

Three long days of relentless illness -- not mine, but first the baby's, then the big kid's, then my husband's. A stomach virus, a particularly nasty one. Lots of laundry, lots of scrubbing carpets, toilets, furniture. Hours of soothing those I love the most while they suffer and praying I'll stay well enough to care for them. Washing my hands so often and so hard they crack from the abuse.

Add to it all the baby's molars coming in and you have an idea of the lack of sleep I've faced.

And as I sit in the dark silence at nearly midnight trying and failing to unwind, I once again hear from upstairs the baby's insistent cries. Third time tonight.

I want to run.

For a moment, I freeze. I can see myself, keys in hand, running out the door. Down the creaky porch steps into the cool night air. I can breathe there. I can hear the sounds of the car -- my husband's fast one, not my practical one -- the decisive thud of the car door, the sound of the engine starting up as I turn the key, the crunch of gravel under the tires as I make my escape.

Where will I go? The destination doesn't matter. Somewhere with a hot shower to wash away the stink of illness. Really good room service. A comfortable bed. A maid. Somewhere where I will be taken care of, rather than the caretaker.

I'm jarred out of my reverie by the memory of Saint Peter. He ran. After all his big talk, all his promises, he ran from the Cross. And in this moment I want to follow him.

But unlike Peter, I have the rest of the story. And therefore, no excuses.

This nudge from the Holy Spirit is enough. One foot in front of the other, I walk to the kitchen, aware of my mission. I prepare the dose of baby ibuprofen. I pour some milk. I climb the stairs and beg for the grace to embrace my cross (for the third time tonight). And then I do -- all 25 pounds of him.

To my great relief, he takes the medicine willingly and nestles against me in the rocking chair as he drinks his milk. As I rock him back to sleep, I talk to God, asking forgiveness for my selfishness and healing for my family. I beg the Blessed Mother's intercession. And I lift my sweet baby into his crib so we can start the night again.

Moving.

The reason I've been absent from posting is that we finally (finally!) sold our house (photo above). After debating it for years, making all the necessary improvements, listing it, staging it, and all the rest, it sold.

Tonight, some neighbors are throwing us a goodbye party. Parting is such sweet sorrow. For five years, we've lived in this home, our lives becoming increasingly intertwined with the lives of these people whom we would not know were it not for our common location.

Often over the last five years we have lamented that our diverse neighborhood could not serve as some kind of model for the United Nations -- Catholic, Jew, Muslim, Protestant, atheist, from every continent on the globe ... raising our children together, celebrating together, mourning together, rearing children together, praying for each other, helping each other. There have been conflicts, and resolution. We have successfully coexisted ... I think of that bumper sticker with the word "coexist" made of the symbols of every major faith.



It's not perfect. Nothing ever is. Sometimes feelings are hurt, people offended. Humans judge one another, it's what we do. So much easier to point out the speck in your neighbor's eye than to fish out the plank in your own. We're packed in here like sardines in this suburban development of townhomes, and sometimes it's just too much. Competition. Claustrophobia. Lack of privacy. Noise - both audible and mental.

But we've enjoyed it here. We will miss our friends, their front stoops, the tree in our yard where the kids took cover from the afternoon sun, the comfort of knowing someone would ALWAYS be there to listen or lend a hand.

And our home. How we'll miss our home. I think of walking out the door next week, locking the keys inside and never coming back, and I feel hollow.

I walk into our kitchen to grab a snack or get another box to pack, and I see myself, four years younger and hugely pregnant with our first baby, down on my knees pulling staples out of the plywood subfloor. Who remodels their kitchen with a baby due in two weeks? We did. And he came a week ahead of schedule (first babies are NEVER early, everyone said to us -- they were wrong), leaving us without a kitchen for his first few weeks of life. While I laid upstairs nursing, eating take-out and recovering from my C-section, my husband used his family leave time to lay a tile floor, hang cabinets and install appliances and countertops. It turned out beautifully. And now it all belongs to someone else.

I walk into our master bathroom and again, see myself hugely pregnant -- this time well into labor, lying on the floor, groaning and wondering if now would be a good time to leave for the hospital.

In our bedroom I think of the love we've shared, life-giving love. Late night talks, tender touches and other things I will not mention here. In the boys' rooms I recall bedtime stories and lying with them at naptime, stroking their little heads and singing made-up lullabies as they drifted off to sleep.

I look at our floors, our paint colors, our lighting, all lovingly selected after much research and thought. It's a beautiful home. We made it that way. And I'll miss it a lot.

I must sound like I'm unhappy with our decision to move. Not at all. I'll soon post pictures of our new home, which is a dream come true, our diamond in the not-so-rough. A 1921 Arts and Crafts farmhouse on four acres in the country west and south of here, in good shape but in desperate need of updating.

What fun it will be to restore this gorgeous home to its previous glory -- in fact, to a glory it never dreamed of! What joy I will have watching my two boys run unfettered through the gorgeous pines that dot our property! They can be as loud and crazy as they want and no one will look on disapprovingly or whisper about our lax parenting. Our boys are BOYS, through and through, and that's something not always celebrated in our culture. I imagine this new home as our respite from the culture -- isolated enough to give us space to think and pray and dream and plan, yet close enough to civilization that we will still be active participants.

Here it is:



I promise to post more pictures and details very soon. Pray for us as we try to move our belongings there this weekend.

For everything else ...

Rib-eye steaks: $12.47. Heirloom tomatoes for a salad with organic feta cheese and shallots: $4.99/lb plus $4.99 for the cheese. Fresh garlic-potato bread: $2.99. Italian red wine: $6.99.



Small hands tearing into dinner with gleeful abandon before we've even sat down to pray: priceless.

Happy Father's Day!

My baby is 4.

Four years ago, I was thrown headfirst into the churning sea of motherhood and told I had to learn to swim. Not only my life would depend on it, but his.

There is no better proof of the love and grace of God than that one as unprepared as I could, four years later, call herself the proud parent of this faithful, kind, intelligent, creative and inquisitive little boy:



Happy birthday, sweetheart. As long as I'm living, my BIG BOY you'll be.

I bought a $500 thermometer.

Actually, it was $509 after shipping. All I have to say is, this thing better work:



I've been eyeing the LadyComp for a while, because I fell out of charting when I was pregnant with my littlest guy and have yet to really get back into it, mostly because I don't have Ovusoft installed on my new laptop and don't feel like paying another $40 to get a new license (it's not the money, it's the principle of the thing). And even if I did pay the fee and reinstall the software, there remains the fact that I hate waking up at the crack of dawn to take my temperature, and then having to remember to enter the data in the computer sometime during the day. None of this is a hardship, but the truth of it is that I really can be that lazy, and this is one of those things I'm lazy about.

Since I'm terrible about recording things on paper and I don't even remember how to plot the coverline because the computer always did it for me before, I've been doing what I call "half-assed Creighton," just paying attention to my body and physical signs and avoiding relations when there's even the most remote chance of pregnancy. Obviously, there's a whole lotta abstaining going on at my house. (Obvious disclaimer: My husband I have discerned serious reasons to avoid pregnancy at this time. Your situation may differ, so please consult with your own spouse and spiritual director, if needed, before using LadyComp or any other form of NFP.)

We need a better solution than avoiding each other most of the month, and since a miraculous increase in my fortitude and diligence is a nice thought, but probably not likely (at least not quickly and without some effort on my part), my husband urged me to give the LadyComp a try. His reasoning is that A) I'm 27 and probably have decades of childbearing potential left and B) We are not in a position to accept the blessing of a new child every year or so for that span, so the average $50 a year the LadyComp averages out to over its estimated ten-year lifespan is totally worth not having to ever enter another number into a computer, write it on a piece of paper, plot another graph, or roll mucus between my fingers and figure out what kind it is.

Please understand, I don't mean to knock NFP. It has worked for us and we are thankful for it. But we are technological people who like technological solutions. And the easier a product makes my life, the better. So I sprung for the LadyComp. I sure hope it works as well as the reviews I've seen say it does. It's basically just a very precise thermometer, but it also contains and internal computer with a database of something like 7,000 womens' cycles, and it stores data on your own cycle as it goes, so it learns your body as time goes on and tailors its recommendations and calculations to your own cycle. And the makers claim it works well with people who get up at night or have irregular periods.

Anyway, we'll see how this goes. Here are some more pics of the LadyComp (it's a lot bigger than I expected!). I'll let y'all know how it works.

Side by Side

Today, I found hidden treasure. My old Photobucket account, which I use sporadically for things like creating avatars and blog headers, contains 111 pictures spread out over six pages. I never look at them. I use the account to host whatever image I need to use at that moment, and then forget about it.

So today, I decided to check out the earliest pictures and see what they were. How could I have forgotten?!

Before I tell you what I found, I first need to give some background. Part of the reason I started this blog was to help me sort my thoughts on homemaking. By the grace of God, and thanks to the advice and insight offered by the wonderful people I've linked to in my Resources and Inspiration list, my house is fairly well-run and looks pretty decent these days. Albeit, my version of "well-run" may look a bit different than some, and there are still a few rooms I keep closed up when company comes over, but they are finally the minority -- most rooms in my house are actually quite lovely. But it wasn't always this way ... much to the consternation of my husband, who in a fit of frustration sometime toward the end of my oldest child's first year, threw everything in my slovenly home office in the trash -- including my laptop computer.

In fairness, the screen was broken and I was not using it. But I had not removed the hard drive yet to put it in a safe place, and that drive contained all of the photographic evidence of Ian's first year. To say I was upset would obviously be an understatement. By the time I realized what had happened, my computer was long gone, and with it, my precious pictures.

So what did I find today in my Photobucket account, but a page-and-a-half worth of baby photos of my oldest son -- all my favorites, no less! I guess I put them there to share on one forum or another back in the dark ages before Flickr and the Blog (is that a great name for a band or what?), and they sat there all this time waiting to be rediscovered! Better yet, my Dad says he has lots of pictures that I've e-mailed to him over the years and is going to burn them onto a CD for me. So I am a happy woman, indeed.

So, what's up with the title of this post? What does "Side by Side" have to do with anything?

Well, this is actually going to be more like "Over and Under," since I can't figure out how to get Blogger to let me put two images side by side. But in each of the next two sets, the top photo is my youngest, and the bottom is my oldest at about the same age. I'm in awe of both the similarities and the differences. God is an incredible artist.




Top photo: My youngest at about a week old (he was six weeks premature).
Bottom photo: My eldest at about a week old (he was full term).




Top photo: Youngest today, at seven months old.
Bottom photo: Eldest in March 2005, at nine months old.

As you can see, the little one overcame his prematurity very well and is now every bit as large and agile than his full-term brother was at the same age or older. God is good, and we are thankful for both of our babies' health and beauty.

Chocolate makes everything better.

Yes, that's a cast on my three year old's arm. He fell down the concrete stairs in front of the neighbor's house. I was spared the horror of watching it happen. I was inside, cleaning the boys' bedrooms while my husband watched them outside ... and then I heard that scream. You know, THE scream that can only mean the next stop is the nearest E.R..

Thank God he was wearing a bike helmet at the time, because he landed on his head. We'll take a broken elbow over a broken skull. We have a follow up appointment June 17 to see whether it's healed ... they don't like to keep casts on little guys longer than three weeks. Which is a good thing, because it's SUMMER! Sandboxes, swimming pools, sprinklers, water fights ... all a bit hard to do with a cast on your arm.

He's been quite a trooper. I think he's braver than I am. And we'll soon have lots and lots of pictures of him in his little blue cast, because his birthday is the 14th, and so is the party! My little guy is turning 4. Amazing.

Family life: When it's good ...

... it's really, really good.

They love each other!



What could be better than that?

Where I've been

God used me to make this little guy, born November 4:



He's nearly five months old and I'm just getting back into the swing of things. It was an exhausting pregnancy (with the insane three year old running about) ending in bedrest and an emergency c-section six weeks ahead of schedule. By the grace of God and many, many prayers (especially the Memorare), he was absolutely fine. As you can see from the picture, he's robust (rotund, even!), and happy. Praise God for His generous gifts.

(Check out big brother rocking out on his guitar in the background of the picture if you want to start your day with a smile.)