HappyMama

Kudos to the gals at CoffeeandDiapers  (2.27.07) for the recap of the Rule of 6.  Which I had never heard of, but I can see the value in passing on.  I’ve been there before - you’ve got this little baby/toddler in your arms and it’s only 9:00 in the morning and you start thinking, “what the heck am I supposed to do with him all day?!”  Here’s the answer.

In other news, I got to go tanning today.  Ten tanning sessions… my St. Valentine’s Day gift from a hubby who just keeps getting better at gift-giving as the years go by.  I don’t think I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, but there’s just nothing like 15 minutes without the kiddos, laying in a warm, quiet tanning bed in the middle of winter.  Thanks, dear!

A favorite activity of our 2 & 4 -year-olds is to listen to books on tape/CD.  You know, the kind where you hear a beep and it’s time to turn the page.  Any adult out there could cheaply make some of these tapes for the little kids in your life.

We borrow some from the library, but the most-loved ones are the tapes that grandpa has made for us.  Aunt Jill is also on one of the tapes.  They used a little bell to make the beep sound.  Ideally, I’d love to have dozens of books on tape, read by all of our beloved friends and family members.  I’ve even thought of keeping the tape recorder all set up and ready to go for anyone who happens to come visit!  It would be better if we recorded the books digitally, so we could burn several copies of them, and share with all the cousins.  We need to work on that.

Frequent reading of favorite books helps build vocabulary and speed up learning to read.  And hearing a beloved relative’s voice is a treasure for their emotional development.  And finally, it gives mom and dad a break from those books that after 100 readings really start to get, well, irritating! 

Lent. 

“40″ - among other things - is a biblical symbol for one generation.  The Chosen People wandered homeless in the dessert for 40 years, and the older generation (excepting Joshua & Caleb) passed away without seeing the promised land.  Christ promised his disciples that the end of the world would come before that generation had fallen asleep… and 40 years later, in 70 AD, the Jewish world, symbolized by the Temple in Jerusalem, was destroyed.

We Catholics choose to spend 40 days preparing to celebrate Easter (which we’ll celebrate for 50 days!)  As Noah waited in the Arc, and as Christ endured temptation in the dessert, we too are marking off 40 days.

My “theme” for this Lent is letting go.  Letting go of what I want.  I was so inspired by Dietrich von Hildebrand’s insistence that we be willing to CHANGE in order to be transformed in Christ.  In every spiritual way that I am unlike Christ, I need to change.  And I need to be willing to do whatever He asks of me, even if it means changing all of the expectations I had before I fell in love, before I got married, before I became a mother.

In our college choir we sang a song that has stuck with me of late, called I Surrender:

I surrender my heart.  I surrender my will.  I surrender myself.  And ask for nothing.     I surrender to the power of your love.

I thought this was an excellent article regarding vocations. (From Catholic Exchange.)

In it is a reference to this blog for men discerning a priestly vocation.

Granted, it’s a scary world to bring a child into these days.  Along with the spiritual “armor” that Scripture urges us to have, we should also be trying to raise up children who are equipped with reasoning skills and articulate language.  So many teens today (okay, and those in their 20’s, too!) hold conversations flooded with phrases like, “well, like, uh, you know, uhm, well, I dunno, I guess so, well, like, okay I suppose, you know?”  What kind of a Christian defense is that?!  And I’m a victim of this sort of education, too.  (When I write, I constantly have to refer to a dictionary or thesaurus, and I waste time racking my brain trying to recall the word I need.  But more importantly, I have trouble actually putting into words at all what I want to say.)  We can do better with our children.  We need to.  Their faith will be challenged, and we can prepare them with the linguistics necessary to “give an answer for the hope” they will carry.

I’ll admit, when I was growing up, poetry was a geeky thing to bother with.  A man named Andrew Pudewa changed my mind about that!  I heard him speak at a homeschooling conference a while back, and now our 4-year-old practices memorizing poetry on an almost-daily basis.  Pudewa founded an Institute with the sole purpose of helping us teach the next generation to speak intelligently and articulately, and to write well.  He’s also a home schooling father and devout Christian.  Poetry, he says, provides

“a vital but often neglected source of powerful and sophisticated linguistic patterning.”

There is more information on their website. 

Our son has a binder of poems, in groups of 20, and a CD with recordings of each poem that he can listen to, or I will read them to him.  The game-plan is to memorize 20 of them to perfection, have a “party” to celebrate, and then get to work on the next 20.  Sound like something that would be hard to get a child excited about?  I thought it would be, but it isn’t.  He loves it!  Sometimes the silly poems make him giggle to the point that you can’t understand what he’s saying, but the memorization is still there.  We are using the poetry program supplied by the Institute for Excellence in Writing.

Now, Lent isn’t about weight loss, it’s about conversion.  But here’s a story I saw tonight about how 6 chubby men lost the weight and got fit.  Get inspired!

Well, the boys had a blast today celebrating Mardi Gras.  What a fun “job” - to clean out all the treats from the kitchen!  (Double click to see a bigger pic.)

My first child taught me how to give of myself.  24/7, to put the needs of someone else above my own.

My second child taught me to trust in God’s wisdom.  After 2 years of devoting myself to my first-born, God gifted us with another child… and how on earth was I supposed to “split” myself between them?  The first week, it seemed impossible.  My heart broke just a little bit.  But very soon I began to learn how beautiful brotherhood could be.  I learned to trust that with each child God wants to give us, He will also supply strength, knowledge, and joy.

My third child has taught me how to smile.  As long as he’s on his reflux medication, he’s all smiles, all the time.  Maybe 200 times each day, and even during the night, he looks in my eyes and smiles this huge, toothless, nothing-held-back grin.  I can’t help but smile back!  He’s breaking down my melancholic, ever-serious temperament and showing me how fun it can be to smile.  This weekend my husband was heading out the door and when I said “goodbye!”, I flashed a big smile - without even thinking about it - and it took him by surprise. 

I’ve never been good at smiling.  I’ve always been too “serious.”  I mean, right now, children are starving to death somewhere in the world.  Why should I be smiling?  When I lived with Mother Teresa’s sisters, I frequently spent time reading her writings.  Mother wrote a lot about the importance of smiling, and I always struggled with that teaching.  (The sisters didn’t!!  They were certainly some of the happiest women I’ve EVER met!) 

In her acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize, Mother mentioned smiling.  “You need to make an effort to know your poor,” she said.  They are strangers, but if you will take the time to smile at them, then love can begin to work.  “Let’s be willing to smile at one another.  Yes, a smile is the beginning of love.  And once we begin to love one another, the desire to do something more naturally follows.”

Once, a group of 14 college professors were visiting Mother in Calcutta.  Before they left, they asked her to leave them with a final piece of advice.  She said, “Smile at each other.  Take some time for each other in your families.  Smile.”  And one of them joked about how it can be difficult to smile at your spouse.  He teased Mother, “Are you married?”  And she said, “Yes, and sometimes I find it very difficult to smile at Jesus because He can be so demanding!”