What I Wore Sunday {39}

I'm so bad about keeping up with these posts. It's been, what, a month again already since my last WIWS? We actually remembered to take a photo after Mass this morning, though, so here you go: What I Wore Sunday at 30 below!

Grey short-sleeved sweater, Merona, thrifted

Coral blazer, Forever 21, thrifted

Black wool skirt, old old old -- thrifted in high school

The goal was "warm but not like a marshmallow"... I guess it worked. That bright coral blazer is so fun to throw on with dark neutral outfits!

It was sure cold this morning! We put Little Bear in his big puffy warm coat, and the nylon outer layer was crinkling and crackling in the cold air just from walking between the door and the car. He complained the whole ride to Mass, because this coat's elastic wrists keep him from pulling off his mittens. Tragic, I know. So he arrived at church with warm hands and a grumpy attitude, which he made sure to share with everyone around us---we spent more of Mass out in the hall than inside.

Maybe his next teeth are finally coming in? As soon as we got home and gave him ibuprofen, he cheered right up. 

Weren't today's readings good, though? Challenging, but such a good reminder of how we are called to live. The reading from Isaiah seems to prefigure the Beatitudes in many ways, and then in the Gospel Christ instructs us to be salt and light... Today the readings just spell it all out: this is what you do, this is how, this is why you do it. In his homily, our priest drew on the example Pope Francis has given us of living as salt and light, particularly his love of poverty and his ability to touch the hearts and minds of so many different people.

SQTF 76: Nap Time

I

This kid needs something. What? I don't know. A puppy. A Rip van Winkle-style nap. To cut those teeth that he's been working on for six months now already. Something. I know that you're supposed to label any toddler-behavior that you don't like "a phase" and reassure yourself that "he'll grow out of it," but that's just not good enough; Little Bear is a whiny mess, convinced that he needs to be holding my hand or perched on my hip every. single. moment. all. day. long., and spends half the day trying to drag me down the hall to the closet so that I'll vacuum. I don't know why he loves the vacuum so much, but I'm not vacuuming every day, let alone five times a day. 

II

Okay, to be fair, the day is ten thousand times better now that Little Bear fell asleep. Here's hoping for several hours of nap so I can recover a tiny bit of sanity. You know the day isn't going well when I'm seriously considering throwing the diet out the window and asking my husband to pick up pizza and ice cream for supper... hopefully Little Bear and I are both less frustrated after his nap.

III

Who has seen Mary of Nazareth, the new one from Ignatius? The Catholic Student Association on campus is showing it as a fundraiser for the next World Youth Day. They were able to rent a local theater for two showings next Friday, at 3pm and 7pm. Matt is going--he's running the video equipment for them--but I'll be staying home with Little Bear. He certainly wouldn't be still and quiet through a whole movie. I'm glad Matt gets to see it, though; I've heard that it is quite good. Although it is a little bit disappointing that I won't see my husband at all on Valentines Day, since he will be leaving the house before we are awake and getting home after I put Little Bear to bed...

IV

Have you heard yet about Edel, the gathering/conference for moms that is being put together for this coming summer by Jen and Hallie? From their website: 

Edel is an event for mothers who need a break.

It’s a chance to form meaningful connections with like-minded women.

It’s an opportunity to hear inspiring speakers who will encourage you in your vocation. 

It’s a weekend to explore Austin, eat Tex-Mex, and toast new friends.

But most of all, it’s a party. It’s a stress-free, no-obligations event where the only thing that’s asked of you is that you relax and have some fun.

The event is July 25-26 in Austin, Texas, and it sounds like it will be a wonderful time. Obviously I can't go, but for anyone who lives closer, check it out! I'm sure it will be a valuable, refreshing weekend for everyone who can make it.

V

Gosh, I'm being whiny this week, focusing on everything I can't do. I'm sorry! Let me try to come up with something cheerful... um... it's sunny outside? We got several inches of snow dumped on us yesterday morning, all in the span of just a few hours, so it's nice to see that there won't be any more shoveling to do today! I'm glad we got the snow, though: Little Bear and I were walking around campus yesterday while it was coming down, and he was so excited to run around in it and stare at all of the huge snowflakes falling. It was definitely a surprise to walk out of the student center into snow over the tops of Little Bear's boots; we don't usually have that much accumulate so quickly.

VI

Somebody grabbed my phone off the counter the other evening, and had taken a bunch of grainy self-portraits featuring the artistically water-stained ceiling before I could get it back. Why did Apple have to make the camera accessible even when the phone is locked?

I think I have to save at least a couple of them; this one was cute, and I'll need evidence in ten years when he is annoyed with a younger sibling for messing with his stuff and doesn't believe me that he was just as good at getting into things we didn't want him to touch when he was little. 

VII

I know I said this last week, but sunlight is so wonderful. Being able to open all of the curtains and have the apartment get brighter instead of darker is one of the best things about going from January to February. The sun is still halfway above the horizon when Matt gets home from work these days, and soon it will be starting to come up before he leaves in the morning! Sun, and fresh new snow for the sun to sparkle off of, and temperatures in the teens: it is beautiful outside right now. If Little Bear wakes up grumpy again, maybe going outside to play for a while this afternoon will help.

Visit Conversion Diary for more Quick Takes!

Mixed Media Musings

I meant to post Monday, for the extra alliteration, but life happened. Oh well.

First off, have you seen the reading speed test from Staples floating around recently? Matt and my siblings have always teased that I read ridiculously fast, so when Matt saw it on Reddit the other day, well, I had to try it. The result? After retaking the test three times to make sure the results were accurate, we can confidently say that I read an average of 575 words per minute. How quickly do you read? Check out the test here!

While I meant it on Friday when I said that I like watching the Super Bowl for the football itself, as former media students, Matt and I both really enjoy analyzing the commercials to pieces. "See why they used that color there?" "Mmhm, and the downsweeping camera angle gives the viewer the illusion of power..." "Oh, gosh, they messed up choosing him; totally the wrong connotations if people have recently seen that movie," etc. I know, we're weird. But you probably would have figured that out anyway as soon as I told you that my favorite of this year's Super Bowl commercials was... drumroll... T-Mobile's third spot.

Yep, the one with a solid pink background, white text, no video, no voiceover. Just background music from Disney's Robin Hood---a genius selection, by the way. Why? It was pretty near perfect! The ad was daring, completely breaking the mold. It was a calculated risk, but guaranteed to stand out as different: In a venue where everyone tries to out-different each other by going more over-the-top, T-Mobile went with shockingly simple. Action montages can blur together a week or two after the fact, but a whole thirty seconds of that shocking pink screen was unavoidably visually arresting. And it didn't leave viewers wondering who the ad was for, with T-Mobile's signature pink and the shared message with their previous two Tebow commercials (airing it third of the three was very important!). They did a good job with readability: not too much text per screen, a good size, clean edges. And the music...

Gosh, they did so many things by choosing that music. Who is Robin Hood? An outlaw, a renegade, someone who is going his own way instead of following along with the punishing rules of the establishment. A folk hero, one who's out to help the little man. Adventurous. Caring. Plucky. All positive ways for T-Mobile to contrast themselves with other major carriers. For two generations of viewers, the music was calculated to tie T-Mobile's contract buyout program to a fond memory. Did you hear that music and outright think, "T-Mobile is plucky!"? Hopefully not, but did the music stir nostalgia and generally positive feelings, encouraging you to keep listening? Then it worked.

One downside to their unique ad style which Matt pointed out this evening is that it probably won't be shared and rewatched as much online as other ads with big-name actors or exciting visuals or cute little kids and animals. And that's very true, although clearly media/marketing geeks will watch it over and over again. Most people showing friends their favorite Super Bowl commercials aren't going to go back and look this one up. T-Mobile's other two ads, featuring Tim Tebow, probably will get their share of "shares," though, so their buyout campaign will get publicized... and it seems to me that this third commercial was meant more to reinforce the message of the first two than to bear the weight of the marketing campaign on its own.

Enough about that! One more medium and I'll be done for tonight: music. I've been meaning to share Peter Hollens' cover of I See Fire, from The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, for a while now. Hollens does layered a capella recordings of covers and original music, mostly covers recently, and shares them on YouTube as well as selling the individual songs and albums. He has a phenomenal voice, and a true talent for presenting all of the rich layers of even heavily-orchestrated songs without any instrumental backup. I See Fire may be our favorite of the pieces he's released so far--it's played pretty much every day here--but his folk songs, like Shenandoah and Scarborough Fair, are a close second. Check his music out on YouTube!

SQTF 75: Feasts, Football, and Sweater-weather Fun

I

Oh, that warm weather spoiled us... I suppose it must be getting warmer again everywhere else, because we woke up to -5 F this morning. And it felt SO COLD, which is absurd, because on a typical year I'd be so happy that it was practically 0 instead of pushing -50 right now. We felt like such wimps this morning, shivering as we walked out to the car! Time to wear the heavier coats and mittens again.

II

The dip in temperature really could have waited a day; if it were the weekend, Matt would be home and we could take turns bringing Little Bear outside to go sliding on the snow hill. (These grownups are definitely bigger wimps than the toddler when it comes to spending time outside sledding.) Below zero, since I have yet to find a way to keep a scarf on him, I prefer to only let him play outside for short stretches of time; adding on the time it takes to get in and out of gear, I usually only want to do it once or twice a day! He would be so happy to spend hours on the hill, though, so when Matt is home tomorrow maybe we will each take him out a few times.

III

Happy feast of St John Bosco, apostle to youth! I'm so glad Little Bear and I made it to noon Mass today. To be honest, I didn't plan to; I had a meeting at 12:45, I needed Little Bear to be fed and happy at that point so I could send him with my mom, I didn't want to be in town for hours and hours, the timing was all wrong... But God must have really wanted me to be there for the rosary and Mass, because at 11 o'clock I looked around and realized the house was clean, supper was under control, and the child was fed and standing by the door holding his boots. It doesn't get much clearer than that!

IV

I need some new ideas for ways to keep Little Bear awake in the car when we are driving home around nap time. Okay, what I really need is a garage, so that I can let him stay asleep in his car seat and just leave the car windows and the door into the house open so I can hear when he wakes up. But absent that, I need ideas. It's a huge problem when Little Bear falls asleep on the way home, wakes up while I'm carrying him into the house, and decides that those ten minutes counted as his nap for the day.

V

Behold, the furthest extent of my arts and crafts skills. I'm so glad Little Bear isn't old enough to be disappointed yet... At least he has aunts and uncles who will have fun helping him make stuff as he gets older. Seriously, though, he has had so much fun with this "telephone," even though he doesn't really understand the point of it yet. And maybe he never will... how, in an age of wireless, am I going to explain to him that the voices go through the string? We don't have a landline at all, so he won't have any frame of reference for what a tin can telephone is imitating.

VI

Super Bowl Sunday is coming up! I'm not all that attached to either team, although Seattle is the team most adopted by Alaskans as "local," and I remember cheering for the Broncos in the last years of John Elway's career. The game was always a day for a party growing up, though, and this'll be the first year Matt and I are hosting. I'm sure that, by Super Bowl party standards, it will barely even count; my family is driving over during halftime to watch the second half of the game, so that Little Bear can nap through the first half, and most of my siblings who'll be present will probably spend most of the time in another room playing board games anyway. But it's still enough of an excuse to make guacamole and hummus and other fun food! And I really do enjoy watching football.

VII

This coming Sunday, February 2, is Candlemas; bring some candles to Mass to have them blessed! The day celebrates Christ the Light of the World: we will hear the Gospel reading containing Simeon's prophecy, calling Christ "a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel." In 638, Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, described the importance of Candlemas and the blessing of candles: "Our bright shining candles are a sign of divine splendor of the One who comes to expel the dark shadows of evil and to make the whole universe radiant with the brilliance of His eternal light. Our candles also show how bright our souls should be when we go to meet Christ." Candlemas falls forty days after Christmas, which is the length of time Mosaic Law proscribed that a women should wait and purify herself after giving birth before she presented herself in the temple---thus the day is also known as the Feast of the Presentation.

Have a great weekend! For more quick takes, visit Conversion Diary!

He Was Almost Too Sleepy To Think Anymore

Definitely my current favorite line from a children's book; every time we hit that page in Guess How Much I Love You, which Little Bear would listen to ten times before bed every night if we'd let him, I have to smile and nod because it's just so very accurate an image. You can tell so clearly when little kids hit that point, and more so recently, I can tell when I'm getting there. I've been having a world of trouble falling asleep and staying asleep again; my brain just won't shut down at night, and I keep discovering that I'm awake at all hours. Little Bear is actually sleeping well these days, darn it; why can't I?

If it wasn't bright and sunny all day long, I don't know how I'd be making it without napping. Fortunately, the skies have been clear and blue, and with the curtains open there is enough light coming in during the middle of the day that I can turn all of the lights off! I love when we reach that point in the year; goodbye horrendous midwinter electric bills! Not entirely, because we probably still have a few months of plugging the car in at night, but keeping it on a timer so that we are only feeding electricity to the engine heaters for a few hours helps. 

Being constantly tired, I haven't been a very fun mom lately... All Little Bear wants is to sit on my lap on the floor and read story after story for hours, and he's just crushed when I finally lose patience with reading the same story five times in a row and plop him on the floor so I can go do something more fun, like folding laundry. I shouldn't complain--I wanted a reader, and I sure got one--but really? Shouldn't he want to play with toys at least part of the time? It's hard to get anything done when he's always grabbing my hand and crying for "One, one, one," more story.

At least going outside is a popular way to take a break from books: Yesterday I taught him about climbing the "mountains" out by the end of the driveway. The graders went through a couple days before our freezing rain last week, so the hills of already-hard snow are immovable. After helping him scramble to the top, I got him started scooting over the crest of the hill, then ran down to the bottom to catch him as he slid down. What a grin! I wish I'd had a camera.

It's not that he never wants anything other than stories, I just realized; that's just the only thing he wants to do with me. The minute Matt gets home from work, Little Bear forgets all about books and is ready to run around laughing and shrieking, tickling his Daddy and growling like a bear and wrestling all over the living room. I guess it's pretty clear which parent is more fun to play with! Maybe if I can get more sleep at night, I'll be able to come up with things to play during the day that'll be acceptable breaks from listening to stories.

January Spring

This is definitely going down as the most gorgeous January ever... Everyone else is suffering through our cold weather for us, while we have been enjoying beautiful double-digit positive temperatures for weeks now! We've had 20s and 30s these past few days, and it's been so great to be able to take Little Bear out to play in the snow all the time. The only thing that could make this weather undesirable would be rain, but that hasn't put in an appearance since Friday morning... Hopefully it stays gone!

Between working from home Friday due to ice and staying home Monday to watch Little Bear while I recovered from several nights of insomnia, Matt had a nice long weekend, which Little Bear sure enjoyed: Daddy is so much more fun to play with than Mama! The two of them wrestled, played ball, and took walks outside over the weekend, and Little Bear was very disappointed indeed to realize Daddy was going to work this morning. It'll be a rude transition back for Matt as well; all OIT has regular work as well as a mandatory playing-nicely-with-others training today and Thursday, and Matt has to stay until 8 tonight monitoring two conferences for the state library system.

But at least the sun is up! Goodness, it's strange; not that long ago we had hardly any light at all, but we've been gaining a quarter of an hour of daylight every couple days for a while now and the difference is tremendous. And not only are the days longer, but the light hours are lighter, as the sun climbs higher in the sky each day: in the dead of winter, it only barely scrapes above the horizon. It's still not high enough that we have to worry about it melting snow, but it's moving the right direction. Just a couple weeks ago we were getting great sunrise photos after Mass on Sundays, and this past weekend the sun was already too high as we drove up the hill on our way to Mass.

With the warmth and light, it's hard to believe we are still only in January. Will it just stay warm all the way through to spring? The warm weather came so late last year--my brother threw his snowmachine in the back of his truck and went down to the mountains after he got home from college in May--maybe this is making up for it. I've never seen a year like this, and while it's sure nice to be reveling in the March weather already, there's an uncomfortable niggling in the back of my mind warning against growing too attached to the warmth... I've seen too many sudden February cold snaps to trust that we won't be plunged into weeks of -40 F to compensate for this loveliness.

SQTF 74: Meltdown, Meals, and Mitten Memories

I

I take it back. Pleasantly-warm weather in January should still never exceed 30 degrees Fahrenheit. This morning it's 43, and sleeting. That's an April temperature, and in April there's enough sun to keep the rain a liquid! January? Not so much. Roads are horrible today, and pretty much everything is shut down; police are warning people to stay off the roads if possible. At least my meeting is cancelled! And Matt shouldn't have to go in to the office, although he's still waiting to confirm that with his boss because the campuses in other parts of the state obviously aren't shutting down just because we have bad weather.

II 

You could say that I'm not exactly a happy camper at the moment, because if we'd known ahead of time about the closures and cancellations, I could still be asleep. Given that Little Bear was up almost every hour last night, that sure sounds nice... but I got up and dressed before we found out, and now I'm too awake. Not that I have anything at all to complain about compared to all the people in the ditch this morning.

III

It's not exactly something you'd record in a baby book, but one thing I want to remember about this age is that Little Bear has picked up this hilarious fake laugh, and he only does it for one specific thing: when he pulls his mittens off while we are driving. Every single time we are in the car, roughly halfway to wherever we are going, we'll hear this self-satisfied little "Heh heh heh heh" from the back seat, and he'll be sitting there smirking and waving his mittens at us.

IV

So far this week our shift in eating habits has gone better than expected. I know they say it takes 30 days to form a habit, and we definitely aren't at habit-stage yet, but not eating between meals and eating salads for lunch every day has actually been manageable, which is better than I expected. It definitely helps that Matt has been putting together the salads, because he puts more thought into them than I would. For example, yesterday's:

Leftover bourbon-glazed chicken, a bit of smoked Gouda, dried currants and balsamic vinegar. Not vinaigrette--I just put straight vinegar on my salads. Don't worry; Matt does a good job of reminding me of how weird I am.

V

Our kid, the inverse picky eater: Little Bear happily eats things like pickles, olives, pesto, and beets. Offer him something normal little kids like, though, like fish sticks or mashed potatoes, and he turns up his nose. And cheese! Sharp cheddar, smoked Gouda, Swiss? He can't get enough of it. Medium cheddar? Won't touch it.

VI

When I think about shopping at Sam's Club, I generally just think of the usual grocery items. Food, paper products, etc. This past week, though, we re-discovered that they can have incredible deals on good brands of clothing as well, and you never know what you'll find: we found heavy Eddie Bauer plaid flannel shirts for less than $7.00! I need to remember to run through their clothing selection each time I'm in there.

VII

After spending a half hour in a video meeting with the rest of his coworkers--because they're the video conferencing department, so of course the boss can't just call them on the telephone--the verdict is: Matt is staying home. I'm so glad. He's working from home this morning or as long as it takes to finish up some projects, then burning a couple hours of annual leave to round out the day. It would be so nice if his boss have them the option to work from home more often--they really can accomplish most of their work from anywhere with an internet connection--but I'm grateful that it's an option today.

Have a wonderful, safe weekend! Check out more Quick Takes at Conversion Diary, and don't forget to vote in the Sheenazing Awards, for Catholic bloggers who follow the example of Ven. Fulton Sheen in evangelizing through the media, over at A Knotted Life.