Theme Thursday: Crack

You can't see it, but it's there...

So today's been interesting.

Last night, Little Bear tripped on the bottom step of the staircase as he was walking downstairs. He cried a little at the time, but was easily comforted and soon he was playing happily again. A little bit later, he got up to walk over to me and he was upset, favoring his right foot, asking me to kiss it (because it hurt). Since then, he has been unhappy about being asked to walk; he can, and it doesn't hurt enough that he cries, but he looks unhappy and asks "Mama pick you up!" So of course I've just been carrying him everywhere.

After talking with other moms and then the pediatric nurse this morning, I brought Little Bear in to his doctor's office. The pediatrician wound up not ordering X-rays, instead sending us over to an orthopedic surgeon so the expert could make that call. 

After doing a physical exam, the orthopedic surgeon was pretty sure that Little Bear does have a tiny fracture somewhere in his foot/ankle/leg, but because he didn't complain at all during the exam, the doctor believes that the fracture is very very very small and not a big deal. Because Little Bear is so young and it's clearly not painful to the touch, he said, a) it's not going to show up on an X-ray, and b) the best course of action is to just let him be and it'll heal on its own. If he still isn't willing to walk on it by next Wednesday I'm to bring him back in, but it sounds like we just have a few days of him laying around or being carried ahead of us. I'm glad that it doesn't look serious!

We didn't get out of the orthopedic surgeon's office until after 2pm, and this morning had been crazy enough that I didn't really eat breakfast, so we were all hungry. Because he'd been such a good boy through two doctor visits and allowed both doctors to do the exams they needed to, I decided that he deserved a reward and took him to Pizza Hut on our way home. Tummy full of pizza, he fell asleep for the nap I'd kind of decided we were skipping today just a few blocks down the road.

...And now I'm regretting letting him, because predictably, it's 11:45 pm and I've finally gotten him to sleep and successfully escaped without him waking back up, and I don't know that I expect it to last...

For more "Theme Thursday"s that are probably much more in line with today's theme than mine actually was, hop on over to Clan Donaldson.

Halloween

Halloween. Every year, I encounter more Catholic and Christian moms who are emphatic that Halloween is objectively evil and their family will not be participating in any way: no costumes, no going door-to-door for candy, no handing out candy from their door. And every year, I kind of scratch my head and give them a puzzled look, then go on with my own business and throw together a costume for Little Bear at the last minute out of ephemera from the sock drawer and the sewing closet.

A part of it must come back, as so many things seem to, to the fact that I grew up in a fairly rural part of Alaska. This morning it was -2 F (negative, as in below 0) as I drove Matt to work. We aren't going to be seeing anyone trick-or-treating in miniskirts here. I grew up in a neighborhood with few kids, and we never really encountered any overly gory costumes. Most people don't do creepy (or any) exterior decorating here, because what's the point if it's all just going to get covered in snow? We and our neighbors did carve pumpkins, but setting out your jack-o'lanterns for longer than a few hours on Halloween night was inviting disaster: I can't tell you how many years we woke up to the THUMP, THUMP, THUMP of moose rolling our pumpkins off the front porch to eat them.

No, really. My brother probably still holds a grudge that I set his favorite cap on a jack-o'lantern one night, and we found it the next morning covered in frozen moose slobber amid the remains of a pumpkin.

Where we live, houses are far enough apart that--especially with our typical late-October weather--kids don't wander door-to-door on their own: mom or dad drives around the neighborhood with a passel of kids in the car, and at least at our house, Mom was always done after maybe two streets of houses and that's just how it was. We all dumped our haul in the middle of the living room floor, bargaining with each other for our favorites, and then squirreled our candy away in the hopes that Dad wouldn't find it and it'd have a chance of lasting until Christmas.

(We also had a rule, as long as I can remember, that we only ever ate candy on holidays and Saturdays. So we could have a piece of candy on Halloween night, and then it got hidden in the antique coffee pots above the kitchen cabinets until the next Saturday, when we'd hem and haw for easily 15 minutes over which one piece we wanted to have that day. My younger siblings are pretty darn good at both hiding their candy from Dad/each other, and at making it last; I don't think that any of them have ever run out of candy between Halloween and Christmas, and Lent definitely helps stretch their Christmas candy until Easter. Rather than being an occasion of sugar overload and gluttony, Halloween was really an exercise in resource management.)

So, evil? I just don't see it. My experience of Halloween has always been lighthearted fun, and since we now live in the same environment in which I had that experience growing up, I don't have any qualms about introducing Little Bear to the celebration of Halloween I knew as a kid.

I'm sure it's different in other places. When we lived in town the first few years of our marriage, there were certainly a few houses in our neighborhood that went overboard on the creepy decorating; we usually went over to my parents' house on Halloween night, so I don't know what the ratio of fine-to-objectionable costumes might have been (we were in a suburban neighborhood just a couple of blocks from an elementary school, and there were a lot of kids in the area). But does the fact that some people try to make Halloween exclusively about horror mean that Catholics should refrain from celebrating Halloween?

This bit from an interview with Fr. Steve Grunow from Word on Fire Ministries jumped out at me:

What do you think of the trend of parents boycotting Halloween on account of it being evil? What would you say to them if they told you such? Not safety or healthy concerns keeping kids indoors, but abject opposition to something believed to be satanic or terrorizing?

Fr. Steve: There is a lot that is unsavory about the contemporary celebration of Halloween. What does the singular focus on violence, horror and death have to say about our culture? The traditional, Catholic Halloween placed these realities within the context of Christ’s victory over sin, death and the devil. The current secularized version of the festival has no salvific content and has been loosed from its theological moorings. It looks very much like a festival of death for a culture of death and for that reason I can see why parents might be concerned.

But what is the proper response to a culture of death? To lock the Church behind closed doors or to let her out into the world? I think it is time for Catholics to accept the religious liberties that this culture claims to afford them and go public with their own festivals- and to do so dramatically and with a great deal of public fervor. What is holding us back? What are we afraid will happen? The reticence and fear that characterizes Catholics is costing the Church its unique culture and it is allowing the culture of death to flourish.  Halloween should not be a day when our churches go dark and Christians retreat into the shadows, but when we fill the darkness with Christ's light and go out into the culture, inviting everyone to the prepare for the festival of the Saints with all the joy we can muster.

You can find the whole interview here: It's Time for Catholics to Embrace Halloween

"The reticence and fear that characterizes Catholics..."  Ouch. Fr. Grunow isn't saying here that Catholics have to be actively engaged in every aspect of modern Halloween celebrations, certainly. But he is challenging parents to "reclaim" the Catholic roots of today's Halloween observances, reconnecting them to the context of Christ's victory over evil.

What does your family do on Halloween?


Here are some more Catholic perspectives on Halloween I appreciated:

Halloween: The Real Story

How to think about Halloween as a Catholic

On Halloween

Don't Bubble-Wrap Your Kids

Seven Quick Excuses

I

Mama: "Okay, all done. It's bed time."

Little Bear: "But... I'm a bunny."

Definitely the best excuse the two-year-old has come up with so far.

II

I'm late! I know. I usually manage to get this up on Fridays even if I don't post anything else all week, but oh, it's been such a week. All kinds of crazy. And I'm pregnant, which is probably going to get used as an excuse for a whole host of things over the next eight months, but it's pretty much always a valid excuse, isn't it?

III

Last Friday's post went up while Little Bear was napping and I was "napping" before Mass. We went on to attend Mass, participate in a homeschooling families potluck (at which Little Bear learned from his uncle & friends to run around waving a sword and howling like a barbarian), and do way too many on-my-feet errands leading up to picking Matt up from work. "I'm not feeling well," I warned him, handing him the keys and sliding over to the front passenger seat for the drive home.

My abdominal pain kept getting worse, and by 7pm Matt convinced me to bundle Little Bear back up and drive all the way back into town to the walk-in clinic before they closed at 8. "We don't want to wind up having to go to the ER in the middle of the night; that will be worse," he responded to my half-hearted "But we can't afford more doctor bills!"

Pregnant + abdominal pain got me seen quickly at the clinic. The doctor asked where it hurt, frowned, and told us we needed to go to the ER for an ultrasound to rule out an ectopic pregnancy.

IV

Because it's flu season, the ER isn't allowing non-patients under 13 beyond the waiting room, so Matt took Little Bear home and got him ready for bed until my mom got there to put him to sleep. He managed to miss pretty much everything; the nurse didn't bring him back to my room until after the exam, ultrasound, etc. I was glad I'd thrown a book in my purse; it was pleasant and unusual to have time to actually sit still and read in between times the doctor or nurse were in the room.

The ultrasound suggested that everything was okay, but the doctor decided to have me come back the next morning when the regular radiology staff was in (it was nearly 11pm by this point). Saturday's ultrasound clearly showed the gestational sack in the upper right of the uterus, and when I followed up with a midwife on Tuesday, we were told that there's only a 1 in 10,000 chance of an ectopic pregnancy if the gestational sack is developing in the right place, a situation he referred to as a "ghost gestational sack"—I have no idea if that's a proper medical term.

So everything is fine, as far as they can determine. I'm still having some pain, but yesterday my left hip started its regular "oh, you're pregnant? I'm going to randomly stop bearing weight when it's most inconvenient for you" behavior, so it seems likely that everything is just preemptively shifting around.

V

Little Bear went to sleep for my mom without any crying or calling for me. And he stayed asleep in his own bed until 4:30am, the longest he's ever ever ever slept in his own bed. We were all amazed.

He apparently used up all of his good bedtime behavior with her, because the next two nights it took hours and hours of crying and flailing and yelling and stuffed-animal-throwing to put him to sleep. We're getting back into mostly-good sleep patterns now, though.

VI
Yesterday at the grocery store, Little Bear and I were hanging out by the front doors counting pumpkins while Matt went through the check-out, because Little Bear was all done behaving in the cart. A portrait studio had a table set up next to the door, urging parents to sign up to have their kid's picture taken: one 8x10 portrait for $19.95. As I was wrangling Little Bear and struggling with sudden nausea, a smiling lady walked over from the table and handed me a registration form. "We only have a few slots left! How long has it been since you've had his portrait done?"

This would have been a situation where honesty wasn't the best policy, but I was thinking more about how to avoid getting sick than how to thwart the saleslady. "Um, never."

Of course she was faux-shocked (or maybe really shocked; is it that horribly unusual to not have professional portraits done of your kids? It's never even occurred to me) and tried to steer me over to the table to register. I demurred, with the excuse that I had to talk with my husband about it first.

She actually rolled her eyes. "Doesn't he trust your judgement?"

Whoa. I managed a polite smile and assured her that of course he does, but we discuss unbudgeted purchases before making them, then quickly led Little Bear back to Daddy at the checkout. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I'm overreacting thanks to pregnant hormones, but was that not completely inappropriate and unprofessional of her? I was shocked.

VII
Being a freelancer tends to mean that I grab every little chunk of time I can find for writing, but I try to avoid working on Sundays. So it wasn't procrastination that had me sewing a "Babe the blue ox" costume this evening instead of working on my immanently-due writing project... No, I'm confident that I'll get all of my writing done this week, but I don't think I could have let myself take a big block of time any other night to do this: 

The hat with ears and horns is still forthcoming, and the tail and zipper need to be attached. I threw together a diaconal-looking costume for Little Bear as well; he'll be St Romanos the Hymnographer for the homeschoolers' All Saints party, as long as I can find the time to make a little scroll for him to carry.

Have a good week! Don't forget to visit Conversion Diary for more Quick Takes.

Theme Thursday: Nice job

Oh, look! Theme Thursday again, and it fits perfectly with the post I've been trying to find time to write all week! I promise I have a bunch of good excuses for being a lazy blogger this week, but you can hear about them tomorrow because today's photography theme courtesy of Clan Donaldson is "nice job," and:

Matt got his first grouse on Saturday afternoon!

He's been out looking for grouse at least every other weekend since the season opened back in August, and finally found one while he was in a place he could shoot and he was carrying his gun. He sent me a photo as soon as they got back to an area with cell reception.

He was actually out tromping around through the brush with my youngest brother and my dad, who has a late-season antlerless moose permit, in the hopes of finding a moose to fill both families' freezers. As they were heading back to the truck, they scared up two grouse. Matt kept one in his sights and was able to get it when it roosted in a nearby tree. My dad was watching the second and my brother tried for it, but he kept scaring it off farther into the woods.

After cleaning it, Matt brought the meat in and asked for a grouse pot pie for supper. A grouse is pretty small, so the pie was more veggie than meat, but it was so nice to eat meat that he hunted for and brought home!

Seven Quick Takes on sleep, fire, food and a happy announcement

Lazy blogger syndrome is back... I'll keep trying, I promise. Thank goodness for Jen's Seven Quick Takes linkup, which usually ensures I post at least once a week!

I

We've woken up at way-too-early o'clock three out of the last eight days with wet sheets... Little Bear's overnight diapers are not doing their job. Then he's cold and wet, and we all have to tumble out of bed and strip the sheets and get him changed and by that point we are all awake enough for there to not be a point to going back to bed, but still tired enough to be grumpy about it. Is there a brand that works better than Huggies Overnights? Or do I have to admit that it's probably time to potty train? So not looking forward to that...

Up early, plus up early yesterday, plus no naps/short naps all week, leaves me ridiculously tired today. Even beyond the lack of sleep, though, I've been tired; everything seems like it takes so much energy, even thinking. Hopefully I'll be able to fall asleep for a little bit before Little Bear wakes up from his nap today.

II

He's napping in his own bed, though; we've made pretty good progress on teaching him that he goes to sleep in his own bed at nap time and bed time every day. He usually winds up in our bed by midnight, but if I wasn't so cold and tired in the middle of the night, I don't think it would be too hard to sooth him back to sleep in his own bed at that point instead of bringing him into our room. The cold is probably part of why he's waking up: he's getting better about falling asleep under blankets, but he still often pushes them off while he sleeps. And his room is by far the coldest in our apartment, which makes no sense because his door is literally six feet from the fireplace, and with the fireplace going in the evenings we regularly get the living room up over 70 degrees.

III

As soon as Matt learned the fire-building technique my dad uses for his fireplace, he had no trouble building fires at home. It's taken me a little longer, but the past two evenings while Matt has been in class, I've successfully built good several-hour one-match fires that really warmed up the living room. Last night it took me an hour to put Little Bear to bed, and when I finally got out to the living room I still had enough glowing coals to rebuild the fire enough to put several more logs on without using any paper or more matches! I was pretty proud of myself. 

IV

I was even more proud of myself earlier yesterday evening for not freaking out when I went to start building the fire and found that one of the logs Matt had brought in to thaw the night before was riddled with bug-tunnels, and there on the hearth was a 1x3cm larvae of some kind that had woken up and wiggled out of the log. No picture; you're welcome. "Not freaking out" is here defined as "not calling Matt while he was in class"... It was definitely unsettling. I made sure the bug-log was the first one into the fire!

V

Matt is hoping to get out grouse hunting again this weekend, and hopefully moose hunting as well. It's making him a little bit crazy that, despite hunting in an area with such a heavy grouse population that the bag limit is 20 per day, he has yet to see a grouse while within reach of his gun all season. The other day Little Bear and I were over at my mom's house, and they had four grouse running around the yard and eating from their mountain ash tree. I snapped a photo from the window and sent it to Matt, and he wrote back, "I can't see any grouse... as usual :-)" The photo is kind of grainy, taken with my phone through a window with a layer of shrink wrap on the inside and fiberglass on the outside (because triple-pane windows just aren't enough insulation for the winters here), so I've circled the grouse:

VI

"Help Mama cook!"

"Mama mixer, round and round! All done!"

"Bring chair, Little Bear do it, help cook!"

(Holding out a mixing bowl and a fork) "More powder sugar, okay?"

I've had such an enthusiastic kitchen helper all week! Every time I've been cooking, he has been very sure that I need his help. I don't want to discourage him from wanting to help cook, so recently Little Bear has gotten to help me make yemas, rice pudding, squash bake, bran muffins, broccoli-egg strata... I don't remember what all. There's generally a lot more to clean up when he helps, but he's learning and having fun, and I'm having fun cooking with him, too.

VII

And saving the best "take" for last... We are expecting again! We're looking forward to meeting the newest member of the Shifflerhaushalt in the latter part of June 2015. 

I'm a little nervous after losing Alex this spring, but mostly just happy and excited. For the most part I'm feeling well, although I'm definitely feeling the first trimester fatigue again. For blog purposes, as well as our own use until baby is born and named, we are continuing our tradition (now that we've done it three times it's a tradition, right?) of picking small(-ish) animal names: Little Bear, Squirrel (Alex), and now we've begun referring to the new baby as Kit. (As in a baby fox, not as in kitten. My brothers will definitely care about that clarification.)

Have a good weekend!

Teresa of Avila

Happy feast of Saint Teresa of Avila! This afternoon Little Bear and I attempted to make a traditional treat from Avila called Yemas de Santa Teresa, from the cookbook A Continual Feast, but I don't actually know how they turned out; the tiny bite I snuck as I was making them made me nauseous, and when I offered one to Little Bear after supper he poked it, unhappily waved his now-sticky finger at me, and refused to taste it. Maybe after Matt gets home from class he will try one and tell me if they're any good.

Even if they're awful, I got to practice my rusty candy-making skills and Little Bear had a whole lot of fun with the powdered sugar, so it wasn't a total waste of time. (When the two-year-old asks, "Powdered sugar off?" do not just agree with him from the other side of the kitchen without turning around to see what it is that he wants to get the sugar off of. Super clean floor now.)

I saw this quote from Saint Teresa the other day:

"If I were to give advice, I would say to parents that they ought to be very careful whom they allow to mix with their children when young; for much mischief thence ensues, and our natural inclinations are unto evil rather than unto good."

A good encouragement/reminder/affirmation for parents that while we aren't called to bubblewrap our kids, we do have the responsibility to be actively involved in defining the "circles" our young children closely interact with.

Saint Teresa of Avila, pray for us!

Seven Quick Takes: Grouse hunting, winter tires and sitting up front

Linking up with Jen at Conversion Diary for Seven Quick Takes!

I

This week was... not as photogenic as last week, I suppose. I don't think I took any photos after the snowy weekend photos that went up on Monday. Little Bear's been a handful, and I haven't been feeling well, so the week has kind of just been blah. Oh! Okay, there was one exciting thing that happened this week; just how exciting it was depends on who you ask...

II

Matt and my dad went out grouse hunting near a lake in an old mining area north of town on Tuesday. Little Bear and I spent the afternoon with my family, and the plan was for us to all have supper together. As they were driving back just before supper time, Matt called to let us know that he'd be a little late because he had to go home and change; he was too messy to come into the house. "What happened?" I asked. "Did you get a grouse?" 

"No..." he started to answer, but my dad quickly interrupted him. "It'll make a great story. Wait until we get there."

Because Matt had to go back home and change, my dad happily took on the role of storyteller as the rest of us sat down for supper. His version of their afternoon:

We were hiking out from Olnes Pond in the direction of the old Vault City mines, looking for grouse, when Matt discovered an old mine shaft. He fell through, landing in watery goopy mud up past his waist. The satellite phone was miles away in the truck. I had to cut down spruce poles and make a ladder with parachute cord for him to climb out. Don't worry, he's fine; maybe a slightly sprained ankle.

III

Matt was very confused when he showed up for supper and everyone was worried about him and asking if he was okay. My dad said, "I told them about the mine shaft," and they both started laughing. Matt's version of their afternoon:

We were hiking near Olnes Pond, going the same direction Ben and I were when we were talking about looking for the remains of old Vault City this summer. There was snow on the trail and a light crust of ice, making everything look smooth and flat, but sometimes it'd start making cracking noises as we walked across it. It's really weird to hear the ground cracking under you; we weren't on a slough or anything. We had just passed a spot where six different trails branched off, maybe ten yards back, when I punched through the surface and landed knee-deep in mud in a rut worn by four-wheelers that the snow had hidden. It turns out my boots really are both waterproof and insulated! I was pretty dirty, but not too wet or cold. Really, I'm fine. I just wish we'd seen a grouse.

Tall-tale hunting stories are an art form in Alaska... but it's reassuring to hear the real story, too. :-) My dad managed to keep a straight enough face to convince my mom and siblings of his version, but I couldn't bring myself to be too worried because Matt had sounded perfectly fine and happy when he called.

IV

I've now done laundry four out of the five weekdays this week, because there was no way the horrid-smelling muddy pond-scummy carharts were going to wait until the next scheduled laundry day. (Laundry normally gets done in the Shifflerhaus on Mondays and Thursdays.) Monday for regular laundry, Wednesday for the carharts and the rest of his hunting clothes, Thursday for regular laundry, and today because there was a very unfortunate leaky diaper incident with the little boy who crawled into our bed in the middle of the night. Sheets, mattress pad, quilt... all getting washed today.

V

Little Bear was very sad about being wet, which wound up meaning that none of us got any sleep after quarter to six. I'm trying to find the silver lining to the "why do I have to be up so early I'm so tired ugh"-ness; since he was awake so early, Little Bear easily went down for a nap at 9:30, so we shouldn't have any trouble making it to noon Mass today. Hopefully he will do as well as he did on Wednesday: 

I was a little nervous about it, but I brought him to an hour of adoration followed by Mass, figuring that I'd probably have to wind up taking him out or just sitting in the cry room. But he was so quiet and well-behaved! He looked at books, played with a Marian bookmark and whispered with my youngest sister during adoration. I moved up to the front pew with him for Mass, which was concelebrated by five priests (so, about 1/3 of all of the priests in our diocese), and he was still and quiet and watching everything all through Mass. I was initially pretty skeptical about the "sit up front so your little kids can see and they'll behave better" theory, but we've really seen results since we started sitting in the first couple of pews.

VI

Driving all the way into and out of town three times in one day is simply too much gas, so I've been saving errands and after Mass we will get as much done as we can before picking Matt up from work. Staying in town all afternoon also uses gas, but given that I need to do these errands anyway, it's not as bad. Today we'll probably spend a while waiting at the tire place; we've been through three Alaskan winters with our all-season radials, and in cooperation with the four wheel drive on the jeep it's been okay, but I was sliding all over on Monday even though I was in 4 and we decided that it would be wise to invest in winter tires this year. The tire shops are all super busy right now so I'm not sure if we will be able to get the tires put on, but at least I can buy them; there's a "buy three get one free" sale that ends tomorrow.

VII

One photo for the week: lounging against the rounder, enjoying homemade yogurt with strawberry jam. That step stool is his favorite place to sit in the kitchen.

Snow Days

Over the weekend, we jumped from about half an inch of snow tops to a good six inches. As soon as we opened the living room blinds Saturday morning, Little Bear was bouncing with excitement. "Snow! Yay! Little Bear outside, okay? Mama outside, Dada outside, play snow, okay!"

We talked him into waiting until after breakfast, but as soon as he finished he was running back over to the door. "Hat, okay. Mittens, okay. Boots, okay!" Because we now have actual-winter snow, he also got to learn about wearing his puffy, warm, water-resistant coat and snowpants instead of the heavy knit snowsuit he'd been in.

Matt worked on re-splitting the wood in the rack by the house (more on that in a minute) while Little Bear and I ran around in the snow—three wet, sticky inches at that point—and took advantage of the fact that it was right around 32 degrees to pack snowballs and build a snowman and a fort. We can't do that most of the winter; even by today, the snow was too dry and powdery.

Once he figured out how to pack snowballs, Little Bear had fun hiding behind the snow wall (or more often, trying to jump over it) and throwing snowballs. I was hoping to make the wall bigger, because it'll eventually form the foundation of a cave/fort later this winter, but nap time came before we were ready. Our snowman fell over before we remembered to take a photo, but it was as tall as I am!

In the afternoon, we enjoyed the snowy weather from indoors: Matt built a fire in the fireplace, and it stayed lit for hours! The fireplace problem seems to have stemmed from both a) the logs being too big, and b) these fireplaces being temperamental and wanting fires to be built using a certain technique. We're fortunate that my parents have the same model and have figured out its' secrets over the years!

Matt's looking on the bright side of having to re-split three cords of wood: he has to keep splitting kindling throughout the winter anyway, so he'll just split a load of logs every time he has to refill the deck wood rack, and it'll make for good exercise all winter.

By this morning we had reached six inches. According to our landlord, what we pay for with our rent includes having someone come plow the (loooong) driveway. And I'm sure that whoever plows our place has a whole long list of people they plow for, and I should just be patient and wait for them to show up. But I don't know if it'll be hours or days, and I really don't want all six inches pressed down into hardpack before the plow shows up, because then the hardpack will sit there all winter and melt and run straight down into our garage in the spring. So Little Bear and I went out and shoveled for a while, until he got too whiny for "Mama pick you up? Please? Pleeeeaaaase?" We will go back out after nap. I'm not crazy enough to attempt to shovel the whole driveway; it's at least an eighth of a mile, all together. But I do want to at least clear the part that slopes toward the garage door.

Seven Quick Takes

Normally I'm the worst at taking photos, but I actually used my camera this week! And not just outside! Next step: learning to take good photos... Linking up as usual on this beautiful Friday with Jen & Co over at Conversion Diary.

I

Winter is here.

We've had snow on the ground since Tuesday. Little Bear loves it. I don't really mind, since it's enough to make him happy but not enough to make me shovel, and it's been pretty fun going for walks with him down the snowy road and practicing stomping and making tracks.

II

I haven't been grocery shopping in a week, so meals have been creative "what do I have in the cupboard?" affairs this week. Diced carrots, frozen peas, vegetable broth and a lonely lamb steak left over from Matt and his friend's adventurous cooking on Sunday came together in a pie for Wednesday's supper; I wasn't following any kind of a recipe, so it was a very pleasant surprise to hear how well Matt and Little Bear liked it! 

Thursday's attempt at creativity with a pork-bean-tomato slow cooker soup turned out pretty bland, in my opinion, but Little Bear ate his entire bowl and asked for more. Tonight I think I'm just making refried bean and cheese burritos with cheese and tomato; hopefully I'll make it to the store tomorrow.

III

Little Bear tried to help me with the soup:

I suppose if I'd taken his suggestions, it certainly wouldn't have been bland!

IV

The plan was for me to go to the store today, but now I'm stuck sitting at home all day waiting for the phone to ring. Because yesterday, this happened:

That's the spring/tension rod on the garage ceiling that hauls the door up and down. Somehow a nut worked its way off, and now the thing is hanging from only three points of contact. The tension needs to be reset, which means having a professional out, which means waiting for them to call and tell me they're on their way. I was number 5 on today's list when I checked in with them this morning, but they couldn't give me any kind of estimate on when they'd actually get here. Little Bear and I were planning to go to noon Mass and the Catholic homeschoolers/preschoolers potluck afterward... Maybe we can make it next time.

V

When I walked into the kitchen to dish up supper for Little Bear and myself and saw his ducks in the wok, I had to send Matt a photo; it was just too perfect, because Matt was in Asian cooking class last night.

VI

I'm realizing that most of this week's takes have been awfully food-related... But I guess that makes sense, since most of my everyday is spent cooking or cleaning, and cleaning isn't really photo-worthy. Hopefully not, at least! In other words, yes, the last two photos are food-related, too:

My mom's recipe for puletta di mandorla for the feast of St Francis of Assisi tomorrow. If I miraculously get the rest of my to-do list crossed off, I'm hoping to make some; they're just slightly sweet, the same shape as biscotti but a softer texture... I like the slightly granular texture the ground almonds give the dough, so I'll be using ground instead of chopped.

VII

Yesterday, for the feast of the guardian angels, I was planning to make angel food cupcakes. Then I looked at the recipe— 7 to 12 egg whites! —and remembered that I don't like angel food cake. Little Bear and I made sour cream poundcake cupcakes instead, with homemade yogurt instead of sour cream. Much easier, at least as delicious, and still nearly just as white as angel food cake. 

They cooled on the counter during Little Bear's nap. After nap I brought him into the kitchen while I prepared lunch; I turned around from reheating leftover lamb pie to see him up on the step stool, going down the row of cupcakes taking a bite out of the top of each!

"Free Play" in today's society

I've been working on this for a week now, off and on, and I just need to hit "publish" because I've been staring at it too long and can't tell if anything makes sense anymore...

This article from Michael J. Lewis at First Things about the long-term negative effects of a lack of free, unstructured play has been circulating recently among moms I know. In general, I found myself agreeing with the author: there are important lessons that kids don't learn, or have to learn as adults, when they don't get enough free play, and over the last couple of generations our culture seems to largely have stopped regarding free play as a necessary part of childhood.

I'm so grateful that my parents had a big yard and felt strongly about sending us all outside every day to play in the yard and in the woods—we made friends with the neighbor kids, played all kinds of disorganized sports, built and razed civilizations in the snow and the mud, the woods and the sandbox and our imaginations. I'm pretty sure I was elected Grand High Zamboni Driver at one point, of a race of woodspeople that was unfortunately abducted to Zorgon by a one-eyed one-armed flying purple people eater before they could build an ice rink. It was tragic. 

When parents' solution to a child saying "I'm bored" is to hand the kid a list of chores, and electronic entertainment isn't an option, kids learn to entertain themselves. The books they read also influence how they learn to entertain themselves. I'm not talking about classic literature, necessarily; we certainly read a lot of that, but I think that the way our games evolved was more heavily influenced by imaginative adventurers like the characters of Brian Jacques' Redwall, Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, and of course Lewis' Narnia books and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Living in Alaska, with easy access to no-other-people-for-hundreds-of-miles wilderness, epic adventures were not only appealing but possible.

We learned so many skills through coming up with our own entertainment, never realizing it until years later: leadership, cooperation and collaboration, respect, inventiveness, planning ahead, the ability to look at a chore or a pile of junk and turn it into something everyone wanted a part of.

The sort of free, unstructured play, by and large without adult involvement, that Lewis lauds and I grew up with seems like an experience many kids are not getting these days. A "play date" is today's substitution for the good ol' days' free play, but the fact that the parents and not the kids are the instigators and organizers (and that "organization" is really even involved) makes it a poor substitution indeed, Lewis argues. I'm not sure I'm convinced that his description of typical play dates isn't a caricature—there most likely are parents who run play dates by dictating what games are played and providing constant policing, but surely it's not the norm? I don't know. If I meet a friend at a park to let our kids play, we mostly just stand and talk, not getting involved in little 2-year-old bickering unless someone is legitimately in danger.

Lewis' piece ended unsatisfactorily, though, expounding on the problem of a lack of unsupervised play and young people's resultant inability to handle risk, but not attempting to offer a resolution other than the easily inferred "It was better the way it was back then, so modern parents should start giving their kids the freedom ours gave us." (To be fair, those are my words not his; he could have intended that a different conclusion be drawn and I missed it.) I think, though, that this solution misses a major reason that parents don't let their children roam the neighborhood anymore the way my parents' generation was able to as kids: it isn't safe. Parents in the 1950s and 60s didn't have the same level of (legitimate) concern that many parents today do about some evil person stealing their children. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the FBI's National Crime Information Center registered reports of 462,567 missing children in 2013. Even in neighborhoods where parents have confidence in their kids' safety, giving their children the level of freedom the author talks about is likely to get the police and Child Protective Serivices called and their children potentially taken away—as Lewis pointed out, a South Carolina mother was arrested this summer for allowing her daughter to play unsupervised.

Perhaps the problem is partly one of shifting population densities. Mayberry probably doesn't exist anywhere anymore, but small rural towns have wildly different interpersonal dynamics than big cities, and maybe parents still feel free to give their kids more autonomy in such towns. In rural areas like where we live in Alaska, at least in families who live a part- to full-subsistence lifestyle, the portrait Lewis paints of modern parenting is incomprehensible. Mom and Dad don't have time to helicopter parent when they are splitting wood for the fire, hunting and fishing and gathering wild berries and putting up garden vegetables for the winter. Think Little House on the Prairie, but with electricity and indoor plumbing. The kids help out, and they find their own entertainment if they don't want to get more chores because they are underfoot!

So what solution am I offering, if I complain about Lewis' lack of one? Other than moving to a rural area, which clearly isn't any more practical for most people than just snapping our fingers and returning to Mayberrian society. I don't know. The urban social environment today doesn't seem able to foster the kind of unsupervised play that teaches kids these life lessons. It's easy for me to look at our particular circumstances, our environment, and say "this is why we're never leaving Alaska!" But that's not actually helpful to parents in more urban places. 

Awareness of the need for unsupervised play, in whatever level your kids can achieve where you are, is probably the first step: resisting the urge to step in, make decisions and resolve conflicts for them unless adult involvement is truly necessary, and reevaluating what "truly necessary" means with different children and at different ages. How else will our kids learn to solve their own problems, to develop their abilities to lead and invent and negotiate? It can be hard! As parents, we want our kids to be happy. But what we really want is what's best for them, and that means giving them ample opportunity to make their own choices and mistakes, and to grow from them.