Photo Update

I have been laid low, very low, by a flu that has taken up residence in my hips and lower back rendering me somewhat useless. Actually, somewhat useless is looking on the bright side. I am very close to completely useless. So here are some photos of Family Day, a provincially-mandated holiday here in Ontario, that happened last Monday. We went skating on the lake. A few days before this photo was taken temperatures shot up to around 12 degrees above freezing and we lost most of our snow. Thus, the spring-like conditions. A week later and the snow is back, as well as the cold; but it is almost March and there is room for hope.
I am too tired to decide which photos should stay and which should go. Take your pick.










Me, skating.
That little dot in the middle of the lake is Joseph. I should have taken a picture of Benjamin standing at the side yelling at the top of his lungs for his younger brother to stop risking his life and come back to shore. Actually, just return to the picture of Ben next to the tree at the top of this post and picture him shouting.
This is Joseph coming back to shore.
Don't try this when it's warm.

A quick update

Friday evening's and Saturday's marriage prep went quite well. We had 20 couples and a few familiar faces amidst the lot.
Isaac performed wonderfully. I brought the playpen, a Snugli, the carseat and the sling, all the while knowing that I should have left all but the sling at home. He took all of his naps in the sling strapped across my chest. He actually slept in the sling for an hour while I gave a talk. I can't say enough about that sling - it is magic. The funny thing is that there was a man there from our church who told me that, when he first saw me wearing Isaac in the sling at mass one Sunday, he thought that I had broken my arm and that I had a special dress-up sling for mass. Until he saw a little arm and foot emerge. Too funny.

Logistics aside, the talks went smoothly and some of the engaged couples' guards came down. Lots of them arrive terrified that they are going to be subject to a public confession of sorts and made to wallow in their guilt. They are pleasantly surprised when they are met by humour, love, fresh faces, and acceptance, not approval, but acceptance.
Moreover I am always warmed to see them move their chairs a little closer together, place their arms around each other and learn, often for the first time, that they have a calling, a vocation, and that that calling is to great things. Some respond and there are standing ovations in heaven.

Thank you for all of your prayers. Keep them up. We have one more full Saturday on the 26th and that is when the harder teachings are brought out. Pray that we all stay well. Isaac came down with a fever on Sunday morning that was gone by night and Ben was a little under the weather today. We need to keep it together til at least Sunday. Actually, nix that: we need to stay healthy til Monday as Dave is running half-marathon on Sunday. Maybe just pray for him;)

Da Bag

Around ten years ago, when I served a year with NET Ministries of Canada, I heard a homily given by a young priest from Newfoundland. The homily was given at a mass during our training period when we were filled with zeal for, and dare I say, pride of the mission upon which we were about to embark.
He admonished us.
His words: "Just be da bag." He really was a Newfie and thus his th's came out a little like those of our eldest son.

He was trying to tell us that, as we went out that year into schools, parishes and homes "preaching the Gospel", we had to constantly remember that we were no more than bags that carry the seed sown by the Master.
He was trying to tell us to be small, humble and dependent upon God who was doing the real work. His words have remained with me throughout the past ten years.

When I first heard "da bag" sermon I thought, with a 21-year-old swagger in my voice,

"I am that bag. I am the bag. I am better than all the other bags..."

You get the point?

My thoughts since have been tempered by marriage (a mirror to the soul), babies, poopy bums, hiddenness, sleepless nights, insomnia, hypochondria and the list goes on.
I think that I can now say with a little more humility,

"I am a bag. One among many; but I am a bag and the Lord can choose to use me if He wants. Even if I don't know about it. Actually, better if I don't know about it."

All this thinking about seed bags made me think about seed drills - something I couldn't have done as a 21 year old who had not yet married a farm boy who would kindly instruct her in seed drills and other farming implements.
But, for the agriculturally uninitiated, a seed drill is a really large, mechanised version of a seed bag.

I was pondering seed drills because, number one, I am longing for spring and, number two, I realised that seed drills get used but once a year and for a very short time - maybe just a few days. Dave informs me that, after their use, seed drills must be scrupulously cleaned and maintained or they will seize up and be useless when it come times for them to be used again. But, for the short time that they are used, they yield an incredible harvest.
In fact, there would be no yield, no harvest without them.

So, to what greater thought do these convoluted ones lead?

Well, we have a marriage preparation weekend coming up starting on Friday and, like those seed drills, Dave and I are being pulled put of the shed to sow some seed.
I hope.

Most couples arriving at marriage prep come because it's something they've "gotta do": the "Catholic classes" they have to attend in order to get married in the Church they no longer attend.
And I am not trying to be facetious. This is a hard audience.

We stand before them for 2.5 days proposing a radically different way of looking at life and living that life. Our greatest words are our lives that hopefully bear witness to the joy that comes with a life lived swimming upstream.

We present the hard truths: no wagging of fingers, no admonishments, no condescension. Just proposals to be considered by the hearers. We speak freely about the why behind Church teaching on contraception, cohabitation, sex before marriage, pornography and, if you can think of a hard sex-related topic, then we have probably covered it.
95% of our audience are already living together, sometimes for years, their lives so intertwined by mortgages and car payments that a period of abstinence is literally unthinkable.
But we still propose it.
We stand together (and in this case with a baby on one hip) to suggest that the zeitgeist of "live together, buy the house and the car, establish the career, get engaged and then get married" doesn't lead to happily ever after.

If anything, the divorce statistics bear witness to that.

But nobody wants to think of themselves as a statistic.

Nevertheless, 1 out of 2 couples divorce and we challenge our audience to ask why. More so, to ask themselves, each other and us how they can be the married couples left standing together when the end comes.

Our answers are hard, challenging and, to many ears, outdated.
But, they work. And so we can't leave them unspoken.
We don't adhere to the "get with the times" challenge of the secular world.
Because the times aren't always what they're cracked up to be.
And I think that the young couples of today are starting to smell that the culture in which they live is a little fishy, if not rancid.

And so it happens that, by the grace of God alone, some couples who come to these marriage prep weekends as a concession to their fiancee, priest or parents find the courage to approach us at the end to say things like:

"I didn't want to come to what I thought would be a waste of time. I leave understanding what it is to be a real man."

Some let what is said go in one ear and out the other; but who knows if one of those seeds might lodge somewhere between those two ears and bear fruit years from now during a time of crisis and disillusionment.

We are throwing out life preservers to a generation that has been left to drown in a sea of untruth, materialism and relativity. I am always astonished when some of those couples grab hold and say:

"Why have we never heard this before? Why didn't I know this before I screwed up? Why did no one think that we could live up to these challenges instead of giving us mediocrity?"

As our bishop remarked to me after one such weekend, "Why am I surprised when people are attracted to the Gospel for which they were created?"

It is an awesome thing to be trusted to speak about these soul-saving, marriage-preserving, love-rescuing truths.
Hard truths that rub the wrong way.

So, these two seed bags are asking for prayers for the two upcoming weekends.
That we can just be bags. That we don't get in the way of God.
And, on a practical note, that the family stays healthy and that Isaac makes his way peacefully through long days away from home. (And for our babysitters who get to really live the culture of life for two Saturdays.)
Thanking you in advance.

Thank God they have souls

Before I caved and let Dave have a dog; I mean, before we bought Sammy as the golden addition to our family, we tried another dog.
He was a shepherd-lab mix and never got a name because he didn't last long enough.
Not that he died.
No, I imagine that he is alive and well with some other less neurotic family. But, we weren't ready for him at that point in our lives.

My discernment of little woof was completed late one night two days into his stay when I stepped in his pee as I tripped to the kitchen in the dark. With two-year old twins still in diapers, my first thought was: I will not do this for a creature that doesn't have a soul.
And back to the breeder went no-name.

Poor Dave, he had to drive a lonely 2.5 hour journey with a nameless pup to ask for his money back and try to explain that his wife, ummm, has allergies to dogs. By accident we failed to return the blanket in which the pup had come - I still remember him every time the slightly ragged, blue towel catches my eye in the linen closet.

So, all that is a lead up to the fact that my children have souls. And I am glad of it. Because if I step in their pee, I might be perturbed, but I won't bring them back.

Which provides a segue-way to this afternoon's events.

Midway through our afternoon movie, Ben got up, walked over to the french doors, lifted the vent cover and peed.

I guess that at some point he also pulled down his pants.

There is nothing like the sound of pee falling from the height of two feet into the metal interior of a heating duct to rise a mother from her afternoon snooze in the Lazy Boy.

"What were you thinking?"
"I just needed to go pee."
"Into your room and don't stick you tongue out at me."

Strangely enough I can understand the attraction of peeing into a heating vent. Not for 33-year-old me but perhaps for a four-year-old me. Consequently, I was more intrigued by his reason for peeing than angry at his behaviour.

So, I left him in peeing purgatory for a while before I sat down on his bed to talk about what had happened. When he was sufficiently contrite I asked him, "But, really, why did you do it?"

"Well, when I'm in time-out in my room and I have to pee, I always pee in those holes," pointing to that room's ducts.
Mother's eyes widen. I look inside and see a gooey conglomeration of pine needles, sock fuzz and something that at one point was wet.
I ask weakly: "Really?"
He gathers enthusiasm as he prepares to out his urinary mentor: "Yeah, and once at night I saw Jacob pee right in the middle of the room."
Which has carpet.

The ragged blue towel can stay in their room from now on.

An alternative to playdough

I branched out in my homeschooling efforts this morning. Ben expressed a desire to paint so I pulled out the water colours and set him up. Joseph soon followed suit. Ben told me that he was painting the world while Joseph was, of course, making monsters. Immediately upon completing his monsters, he wanted to show them to Isaac to see if his creations were sufficiently terrifying.

I mentally patted myself on the back and thought, "Hey, look at me: all homeschooly and creative. Wow."
So, I put on Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and told Ben, who had begun to pack up his art supplies, to paint swans.
Because that's what the music is about.
He looked at me with a look that said, 'What has gotten into my mother?', and said, "I have to go pee."
When he arrived back, he told me very firmly, "I don't want to make swans. Why would I do that?"
And then I noticed that Joseph was drinking the used paint water.
If my life is anything, it is humbling.

The Regular Scourge

I'm still here.

We've just been going through our regular February stomach flu. Hannah started us off with a week long bout; followed by Joseph who mercifully lasted only one day; and then Jacob who groaned for two solid days (and most of one night). Benjamin has yet to go down and I think that he just might have missed this one. I believe that Isaac had a stomach bug yesterday because he refused to do anything but nurse and poo - the last he did a lot and with great concentration.

Dave spent a night feeling pretty nauseous (evidenced by a bowl found next to the bed in the morning.) Nevertheless, the next day was the big broomball tournament (don't even ask, I'm not entirely sure) and he insisted on going - coffee and breakfastless. He recovered by noon and lost the trophy on a technicality. Jacob and Hannah's school won. This is a small-town scandal - the twins' school's players don't even wear broomball shoes (the horror!).

(And, for a good laugh, google 'broomball shoes' - they are hilarious to behold - sort of a cross between Magic Johnson and Ronald MacDonald. And then picture Dave wearing them. Because he does. He is even skipping out on a good hour of our upcoming marriage prep weekend to don his magic shoes and coach his students in a tournament. Broomball shoes - the new Natural Family Planning.)

But, back to throwing up.

Hannah missed so much school that, when I ran into the mother of one of her classmates, the mother told me that her daughter had told her that Hannah had quit school.
"What?!", her mother asked.
"Well, she doesn't come anymore."
To which the daughter then added, "Can I quit school too?"

I've had several picture posts lined up but this computer refuses to acknowledge that I have taken any new pictures: No new images found on device. Oh.

So, there.

It's the shortest month of the year; there are only three weeks left in this month until March when we can legitimately hope for Spring. Meanwhile, I will do my best to live in this moment even though it happens to be found in February.