SQTF 56: So Much Crazy

Stop by Conversion Diary for more Quick Takes!

I

The last two days were a crazy whirl of ice storm, blizzard, and power outages, none of which are at all typical for our winters. Snow, and only snow falls straight downward, and is so light and fluffy it can pile five inches thick on a power line before gravity takes hold of it... That's what a snowstorm usually means. The past few days, though, have been filled with wildly-flying slush. Yuck. It's been nice and warm--in the upper 30s and 40s--and I haven't even set foot outside because the storming is so nasty. Power went out twice yesterday and once this morning, but was fortunately only out for an hour or shorter each time. I wasn't sure how I was going to feed Matt and Little Bear supper last night if the power didn't come back on!

II

We all came down with a cold more than a week ago, Little Bear, then Matt, then me. Little Bear is getting close to being over it, I hope? He's still sniffly, but we haven't had an hour of coughing in the middle of the night since Sunday or Monday. He developed an ear infection on top of it and the pediatrician gave us amoxicillin, which it turns out he loves the taste of... it's certainly no struggle to get him to take it! She warned us that it could cause diarrhea, but no one said anything about it dying the mess orange-red; that was a shock. I guess I'm supposed to be intelligent enough to figure out that he's ingesting pink dye twice a day... But really, why do that to a mom who's probably sleep-deprived given that she has a sick kid?

III

The word of the week is "Ding!" Every time anything in the apartment makes a chiming, ringing, buzzing, etc sound (dishwasher, dryer, microwave, phone...) Little Bear looks up from whatever he's doing, turns back and forth until he figures out what it was, then runs over to the device shouting "Ding! Ding!" I think this is the first onomatopoeia he's learned on his own? He knows animal sounds, but that's from Matt and I reading him books... And we also taught him the "vroom" for trucks, "boom" for things falling, etc. It's exciting to hear him picking things up for himself.

IV

Since, goodness, as long as he's been able to sit up, Little Bear has liked to sit on the bathroom counter while we brush our teeth. (Yes, we keep a hand on him, or at least stand right behind him now that he's bigger.) For a while now he's known how to work the faucet, and will happily turn it on and off, on and off. I'm grateful that he finally seems to have gotten tired of sticking his socks in it. But so this morning, as I set him on the counter while I got his amoxicillin ready, it didn't register that he was holding his stuffed polar bear. Until the water was running and the bear was in the sink, filling the sink basin, taking a bath and splashing water everywhere. Oh child.

V

For some reason, Dave Ramsey has been all over my feed reader this week. I know a lot of people have been helped to get out of debt by his techniques, and I'm sure his money management methods work for many people. His 'credit cards are evil' philosophy irks me, though, severely. Ramsey says, on his website: "Responsible credit card use does not exist. There is no positive side to credit card use." I'm sorry, but that's just not true, and it really seems to deny the existence of free will. Now I do understand that he is talking to people who are largely trying to get out of debt, and so he is taking an approach similar to AA: vilifying the object of the addiction/problem. I remember a conversation with my sister after she attended some AA meetings for a nursing class, where she was struggling to understand how good adults she respected could ever have even one drink if alcohol was such an evil thing. Alcohol is like credit cards: inanimate matter, which people can use well or poorly. The "vilify the object" approach may work, may even be good, in helping addicts overcome a problem, but just because some people are incapable (for whatever reason) of using an object rightly, that does not mean that everyone is incapable of doing so.

VI

Obviously, we have a credit card. We also follow a pretty strict budget, eat "mystery surprise casserole" at the end of the month if another shopping trip would put us over budget, and pay our balance in full every month. We certainly could use cash for all of our purchases the way Ramsey recommends, but we don't, for two reasons. First, contrary to Ramsey's claim that "when you pay cash, you can 'feel' the money leaving you. This is not true with credit cards," both Matt and I find that spending cash thoughtlessly or frivolously is much, much easier than doing so with plastic, because with the card, we can see the numbers in our budgeting software. Cash purchases simply "don't exist" in our minds; once the cash is withdrawn from the bank, it's out of the system and not accountable-for. And secondly, we live in Alaska. Traveling anywhere out-of-state is obscenely expensive, and flights all the way out East to see his family run easily $1200 per person. Spending an entire month's pay on a trip, even as important a trip as visiting family, sure doesn't sound like good financial stewardship to me! By using the Alaska Airlines Visa card, though, and using it for pretty much everything, we are able to earn free tickets. As long as we pay in full each month, and we do, we believe that we are indeed using our card responsibly.

VII

Sorry for the rant... No more finances for a good long time, promise! It's just been eating at me for a while. I should probably follow the kid's example and go to sleep... Have a lovely weekend! We are hoping (okay, maybe not Matt) to hit at least one of the Christmas bazaars around town tomorrow and finish up Christmas shopping so that I can get out-of-state gifts sent out in the next week or two; all of the mail in and out of Alaska bottlenecks through one post office in Anchorage, and it's generally accepted that anything shipped out of Alaska after December 2 won't get where it's headed until after Christmas. (So I'm not just being absurdly organized, it's actually important.)

Finding Order

What with the bedroom ceiling leaking, the car suddenly needing to go in to the shop, the cold/ear infection/stomach plague descending on our house and other fun happenings, I'd been in something of a snit the past couple of days. Why does it all have to happen at once? And why isn't there anything I can do to make any of it go away?  My eternally-patient husband, bless him, has had a grumpy wife.

Fortunately for all of us, I talked with a friend yesterday afternoon who remarked on her own grumpiness recently, recognizing that it wasn't a productive attitude and she should do something about it. I was ashamed to realize that she has so much more a reason to be unhappy than I do--all of my current problems are going away, largely without all that much effort on my part, even if it's not happening according to my ideal snap-my-fingers-poof timeline--and yet she was responding much more gracefully than I.

But thankfully, there's such a thing as grace. And second, twenty-second, and seven-hundred-forty-second chances. After that conversation and a good nap, Little Bear and I were able to greet Matt after work yesterday with a mostly-tidy house. The plumber came and fixed the leaky pipe. The mechanic couldn't duplicate the problem in the car, declared it a computer glitch, and didn't charge us anything. And dinner turned out particularly awfully, but we were able to laugh at ourselves for not having learned our lesson the last time we put pumpkin and pasta together.

It sounds so easy to just "ask for grace when you need it," but it's not. Is that due more to pride, wanting to do it all myself, or is it just hard for my frazzled, exhausted brain to form coherent thoughts beyond the concrete tasks and problems in front of me? Probably a bit of both. But Little Bear had an excellent night last night--I don't recall him waking up even once--so we both came into today better prepared to make it a good one. 

Snow drifting silently past the window ever since we woke up has given the day a peaceful tone, at least for those of us who don't have to leave the house; they are calling for freezing rain tonight, but hopefully that won't start before Matt is safely home. The well-rested child, still nursing a cold but acting much less sick, was happy to play and participate in chores all morning. We dusted, vacuumed, cleaned the kitchen, built and knocked down towers, washed a load of towels, read book after book after book... After inhaling half of my lunch, the boy was happy to go down for a nap. 

Watching him sleep, looking around the mostly-tidy apartment, mentally walking through dinner plans, I feel more at peace than I have for a while. Everything is falling back into place; life is becoming orderly again. More than anything, I think my earlier grumpiness can be attributed to the loss of order: schedules were thrown off by the illness, budgets were threatened by unexpected repairs, the usual flow of life was turned all inside out and order was supplanted by uncertainty.

Maybe that uncertainty was a chance to develop a deeper trust in God instead of trying to find our own path in the chaos. If so, I kind of missed it, didn't I? At least I got it right by the end. And since God is Order, the fulfillment and perfection of order, I guess I was seeking Him even when I didn't realize it. 

Baby steps.

Day of Rest

At quarter to 11 last night, our poor teething toddler with both an ear infection and a cold finally stopped coughing and fell asleep. As I lay there, staring up at the ceiling and trying to fall asleep myself, I noticed a dark spot just off my side of the bed. 

No. Please no. No no no no no, the ceiling was NOT leaking again. 

I lay there for five minutes, trying to convince myself that it was an old water spot and I always saw it there every night. Finally I gave in, and carefully, carefully, not waking the barely-sleeping child next to me, knelt on the edge of the bed and reached up to touch the spot. Wet.

I poked Matt. Should I call the landlady? It's 11 o'clock at night. But there's water seeping through the ceiling. But the child needs this sleep so badly. But water. But it's not really over any furniture... I squinted at it a moment longer. No, it might overlap the edge of the bed if it spreads any further. Will you help me move the solid wood bedframe in the dark without waking the toddler sleeping on it?

Ladies and gentlemen, my husband is amazing. The bed was moved soundlessly; the toddler did not stir. Matt went back to sleep while I broke the news to our landlords, reassured them that we would be happy to just stick something under it until morning, and layered the side of the bed and the floor with towels.

-----

Can we please have another weekend to recover from this weekend? It's just been one thing after another since Matt left work early Friday afternoon to bring me the car so that I could take Little Bear to the doctor and get a prescription for his ear infection. Matt and I have both come down with Little Bear's cold; the doctor gave us amoxicillin, which I'm allergic to, so Matt has to help every time Little Bear needs it; he spent the 3 am hour last night coughing and crying; we woke up to a foot of heavy wet snow outside, and apparently not even the freeways had been plowed when my parents drove to 7:30 Mass this morning. 

Sick toddler coughing all over the place, sick sleep-deprived parents, snowed-in culdesac; we didn't make it to Mass this morning. We are both pretty sure that we are still in the contagious stage of this bug, and Little Bear isn't up for leaving the house--he threw up from coughing so hard last night, and again today. And with the reports of scattered freezing rain throughout the valley, on top of this huge snow dump... staying indoors, away from other people, seemed like the most prudent choice. It's disappointing, but we read the Mass readings and added some extra prayers to our usual ones. 

Our landlord came down midmorning, and he and Matt poked around in the ceiling and discovered that an elbow in the pipe draining from their bathtub had split open along its seam (no idea if that explanation makes sense; I know nothing about plumbing). Since it's stopped actively dripping, they decided to wait until tomorrow to call out a plumber... I understand wanting to avoid weekend emergency charges, but the room smells so musty and icky with the tile left open overnight. It doesn't seem to bother Matt or Little Bear; I guess my nose just isn't stuffy enough.

Thanks to the latest throwing-up episode, which took place ten minutes after he finally went down for a nap, a) we are aaaaaall out of laundry soap, and b) he thinks he took a nap and is all done sleeping until bedtime. I'm so grateful that Matt is here to take turns reading stories over and over to the child.

We all need sleep so badly... is it bad that I'm half hoping that Matt is still sick and unable to go in to work tomorrow?

SQTF 55: Winter and All That Comes With It

Linking up as usual with Jen and all!

I

The snow is still here, predictably. I won't keep saying that every week from now through May, I promise. Okay, I'll probably start complaining about it in April again. But this week, there was always a chance... a super faint chance... that a warm front would move in and melt away this first real snowfall. No dice, though; we are stuck with it. The city didn't even bother to send out the snowplows, because it's already November and everyone with sense had their snow tires on a month ago, and it's really a given that we have a layer of hardpack on the roads by this point. Thankful for a 4WD vehicle! I wouldn't feel safe, or like a responsible driver/parent/etc, in anything less in our winters.

II

The first cold of winter synchronized perfectly with the arrival of the snow: poor Little Bear hasn't been able to go out and play in it again since the first day it fell because he's been cooped up inside with a nasty head cold. He's doing his level best to share it with both parents, but we haven't quite succumbed yet... We shall see. I feel so badly for the poor child; he isn't old enough to have any idea why his nose is doing this to him--he just knows that he's miserable.

III

Oddly enough, having a sick little boy sleeping between us has translated to the best sleep any of us have gotten in months. Maybe he just doesn't have the energy to flail around like he usually does? Whatever the reason, it's been marvelous, even if he is snoring louder than his father.

IV

This morning it was only 0 F when I woke up--brrr! It's still better than yesterday, though, which had only warmed up to 2 F by 5 pm. We were sorry to finally put away the fall jackets and hang the bigger leather and wool coats by the door. Time to switch to heavy gloves, start thinking about wearing hats, stock the back of the car with emergency winter gear. Little Bear has been none too happy about wearing winter boots in the car! Every time we have driven somewhere this week, he has complained about them.

V

Yesterday evening, Little Bear and I bundled up and drove across town to pick up a new plug end for our car timer. With the temperature falling below 0 at night, it's time to start plugging in the engine block heater, oil pan heater, etc. so that the vehicle will start in the mornings. (Yesterday morning, Matt tried to take his department's van to fix an offsite problem and it refused to start.) To avoid leaving our car plugged in and drawing current all night long, we plug the extension cord into a timer, which is plugged into the wall. 

VI

Our first winter, we bought a plastic timer because that was all they sold anywhere in town. The first time it hit -50, the plastic shattered. We just plugged it in to the wall all night for the rest of the winter . Our second winter, we looked everywhere for an old-fashioned metal timer, and eventually learned that no one even makes them anymore. Not wanting to wake up to a frozen engine block again, we decided to skip buying another plastic timer and plug in to the wall all winter. The electric bills were awful. This past summer, we found an old metal timer at a garage sale. The ground was broken off, so it needed a new plug, but the $20 total investment should be quickly made up for in savings on our electric bill!

VII

Our light is fading quickly, along with our warmth; when I got into the car at 4 pm yesterday, the sunset was a narrow orange band across the horizon and the moon was very visible above it. Soon enough, we will be able to see the moon 24 hours a day. Having snow down helps tremendously, though: the white layer everywhere catches and reflects the light we do get, making this past week seem substantially brighter than the previous week, at least during the middle of the day.

Snow Day

Snow back in mid-September was unacceptable, but on November 5, it is beautiful and much looked-for. I cannot recall a year that winter has waited so late to settle in. The whiteness is finally here, though; here until April or May, most likely. Snow has been falling since we woke up this morning, making Matt's commute exciting, I'm sure. Little Bear noticed it as soon as we walked into the living room, and ran over to the window, pointing. 

"Snow is falling, see?" I told him. "O! Boom!" he answered. Falling, boom... it made me laugh that he made that connection, although the tiny flakes aren't exactly going "boom." 

It looks like November outside. For such small flakes, it's piling up surprisingly quickly: Only a few tufts of grass poke up through the white blanketing the yard; each fence post wears a small white cap. There is a good inch of fluffy, feather-light powder along the deck railing, and Little Bear's nap was (unnecessarily, in my opinion) cut short by a perhaps over-eager landlord snowblowing the walk.

I've been away from Lower 48 autumns for too many years now; is it really so odd to be pleased by snow taking up a semi-permanent residence in my yard in early November? It's hard for me to even imagine not having snow on the ground for the next five months, at least. Matt sent me a photo he saw online yesterday of the Pennsylvanian Appalachians right about now, but as he mourned the fact that we didn't have Novembers like that, I looked at it in some confusion. Why are there still leaves on the trees? Those poor people--without snow, how can they enjoy the coziness of the Thanksgiving-Advent-Christmas season we are so quickly approaching?

After the mail was delivered, Little Bear and I bundled up and ran out to play in the snow on our way to the mailbox. He is walking so much better now than he was when we got that ridiculously early snow in September; then he didn't even try to move when I carried him outside in his snow gear, but today he was running around in his snow boots, laughing and trying to grab hold of the snow.

What I Wore Sunday {35}

Little Bear is still trying to cut the incisors he's been working on for two weeks, y'all. I'm tired. So hopefully my total lack of brain this morning can be excused... 

I woke up to Little Bear fussing and looking for food, but that made sense because the clock said 8:00. That's really weird, I thought. Were we all so tired that my alarm didn't wake any of us? It was already too late for us to make it to North Pole in any semblance of calm and orderliness, though, so I shrugged and laid back down to let the child nurse. I guess we're going to Mass on campus again. A half hour later, my alarm went off. We were supposed to change the clocks last night! Thank heaven for cell phones that update automatically.

In my defense, last night was not a normal evening. Matt was out watching a movie with a coworker until 9, and Little Bear--who was nearly asleep--perked right up and dove off the bed to go find Daddy as soon as the front door opened. He enthusiastically ran around in circles with his stuffed bear while Matt got ready for bed and told me about his evening, and it took quite a while to get him back down! 

Because it'd been a late night, and we were both tired, and Little Bear seemed inclined to continue his pattern of nursing for ten minutes, sleeping for fifteen, repeat, Matt and I decided to take advantage of the time change and wake up slowly, going to the later Mass on campus after all. 

The university parish doesn't have a church building; they have a small crypt chapel in their Catholic Student Association building (an old house that served as administrative housing fifty years ago), but it only holds 20 or so people, so for years they've held Sunday Mass in a large auditorium. And walking in, there's no escaping the fact that you're in an auditorium; even set up for Mass, it's hard to see it as church. This fall, a brand-new building was completed for the biology department, and the parish was offered use of the gorgeous new auditorium. Today was the first Sunday in the new space, and wow. The seats are at a much less steep angle, there are no stairs, there is room for communicants to not have to walk behind the altar after receiving... It's so much nicer! The auditorium is also set up for video conferencing, and Father is hopeful that they will be able to live stream the Mass out to the remote villages that don't see a priest for a month or longer at a time. Matt works in the university's video conferencing department, so all the way home he was talking through ways they could make that work; ministry to the villages is so badly needed, I really hope they are able to make it happen!

Blue sweater: hand-me-down

Brown eyelet skirt: thrifted

Chocolate pumps: garage sale

The little bear is sporting a blue striped turtleneck from his Grandmom and a pair of hand-me-down brown fleece overalls. I didn't intend for us to match, but it's always fun when that happens. Even Matt fit the color scheme this week, with dark khakis and a tan-brown-blue argyle sweater!

Join us over at Fine Linen and Purple for more!

7QTF 54: All Saints Day

Happy Solemnity of All Saints! Joining the party at Conversion Diary.

I

We are officially slacking at our parental role of photographing every aspect of our firstborn's life to pieces. Yesterday was Halloween, and we dressed him up and ran all over the place--played with friends at the ice rink, had supper with my family, visited our landlords--and we did not take a single photo of our little construction worker.

II

We're really just fortunate that he had a costume at all, because somehow Halloween snuck up on me this year. He received a bright orange vest as a gift a few weeks ago, and several days later I was walking through Michaels and stumbled upon a bright yellow foam hard hat. Voila, Bob the Builder! Matt outgrew dressing up at least a decade ago; I still enjoy it, and am convinced that having a little one makes that acceptable, but this year I didn't come up with anything. Maybe next year, when he's old enough to trick-or-treat.

III

Fortunately for my didn't-plan-well self, Little Bear's construction costume transitioned easily to a saint costume for today: take normally dressed child with vest and hard hat, discard vest, add head lamp to hat. St Parin, patron of tin miners. Parin wasn't technically a miner himself, but he did legendarily discover veins of tin in the bedrock of Cornwall, so I thought the miner getup was okay.

IV

It was a good bet that there would be other adults in saintly attire at the homeschoolers' All Saints party after Mass today, but I didn't really have the time or inclination to put a lot of effort into a costume (plus I wanted to look normal for Mass), so I spent spare moments this morning browsing Wikipedia articles on 20th century female saints. Gianna Molla is the obvious choice, but it was too obvious--plus, my sister did a much better job than I ever could last night, wearing scrubs and a lab coat. I'm glad I kept reading, because I came across a married couple I'd never heard of before: Blessed Luigi Quattrocchi and Blessed Maria Corsini. 

V

The Quattrocchis were the first married couple ever to be beatified together! They had four kids, and lived in Italy in the late 1800s to mid-1900s. When they were beatified, the prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints described them as truly living the domestic church, being open to life, to solidarity with the poor, to reaching out to others through friendship... I'm paraphrasing badly here. But they sound like great role models for married couples, and I definitely need to go read more about them. For today, I didn't exactly have a closet full of turn-of-the-(last)-century Italian high fashion (Maria was Florentine nobility), so I just went with a sweater and conservative skirt in a cut hopefully reminiscent of the latter years of Marie's life.

VI

Matt usually doesn't get lunch until after 1pm, and has had to work late all week, so we weren't sure how he was going to make it to Mass for the holy day. I know, the Church doesn't oblige us to do what's impossible, but it's still important to make our best effort! One of his coworkers was willing to switch lunches with him today, so Little Bear and I met him for the noon Mass at the chapel on campus. I'm glad we were able to go together! Little Bear behaved very well, much better than he would have if I was trying to wrangle him on my own.

VII

I had a lovely dinner planned for tonight to celebrate the solemnity, but just now, I'm starting to wonder if we won't just be celebrating with a frozen pizza. World's greatest housewife I'm not. Since it's finally (finally!!!) November, I rounded up all of our groceries this morning before Mass... except for diapers. Little Bear is consistently...overfilling...his diapers at night, but he's too small for the next size up. I've been having to wake him up in the middle of the night each night to change him in order to avoid wet sheets. My sister-in-law suggested I look for overnight diapers, and I've been counting days until the new budget-month so I could get them! So this morning I went to pick some up, and they were out. I popped into the store across the street, and they were out too. After the All Saints party at my parents' parish I hauled the sleepy little man over to Walmart... and they were out too! Little Bear refused to go back in his car seat without eating, and fell asleep nursing. First real nap of the day at 3pm? I couldn't bring myself to wake him by sticking him in the car seat. I have to pick Matt up from work across town in about a half hour; what are the chances Little Bear will wake up in time for us to try another store on our way to the university?

Have a blessed All Souls Day tomorrow! I always forget, so remember: even if attending Mass isn't an option (there won't even be any Masses celebrated for All Souls here that I know of), stopping in to a church on All Souls Day and praying for the souls in purgatory can merit an indulgence for them! Little Bear probably won't be quiet long, but if I can find an unlocked church in town I'm hoping to stop in briefly.