A birthday post

I woke up this morning to many happy birthday wishes.  One of the advantages of so many children is that one is almost always guaranteed a handful of homemade gifts and cards on one's birthday.  The offspring did not disappoint.  This is Joe's card; or, rather, one of Joe's cards.  He keeps disappearing and re-emerging with new pieces of paper hastily scrawled with sentimental greetings.

Happy Birthday Mom!

I love you!!!!!

author and illustrator Joe

 to our Birthday Queen

Dad gave the seeds to mom

these seeds were Ben Joe and Hannah and Jacob

(originally forgotten and then added later: IA SA - Isaac and Sarah)

these seeds gron (grew) and were born by our Beloved mom

to:  mom

from:  Joe

Can you tell where we are in the various stages of learning about family life and procreation?

Hannah orchestrated this card (her work is at the top of page one).  Isaac's is at the bottom half accompanied by Hannah's translation.  Apparently, Isaac depicted a tiger caught in an Isaac-made trap.  Upon its capture, Isaac yelled, "Booyah!"  I think the tiger was caught in my honour.

This colourful scene is from Joe.  From this I have discerned that I am to expect a very tall and skinny cake later in the day.

 

Jacob, in his standard cursive, wrote, "Happy birthday to a 1x37 year old mom in her prime."  I hope you get the mathematics joke.  I did.  Later on he assured me that this year was going to be a good one, "After all, Mom, you were last in your prime 6 years ago."  And I will be again in four years, Jacob.

 Ben attempted his name in cursive, coached by his older siblings.  His love is a many-hearted thing.

 Joe gave me another gift, a tree ornament that he made from Perler beads.  Perler beads, unfortunately called Pyssla at Ikea, are a huge hit at our house.  Joe spent hours making various ornaments for the tree.

 Jacob's gift was by far the funniest.  He presented it to me while taping it on to a mason jar with a candle in it.  He placed it on the counter and the label immediately popped off and fell to the ground.  We both burst out laughing.  He also read me a poem from Calvin and Hobbes:

I was going to buy a card

With hearts of pink and red

But then I thought I'd rather

Spend the money on me, instead.

Happy Mother's Day to you.

There, I said it.  Now I'm done.

So how 'bout getting out of bed,

and cooking breakfast for your son?

I could only have loved it more if Jacob had written it himself.

 Hannah has waited a few weeks to give me her gift which she made at a friend's house under the tutelage of her artist-mother.  While I don't agree with the sentiment, the painting is quite beautiful.

 Dave never fails with the grocery-store flowers.  And the younger children never fail to yell, "Mom!  Dad got you flowers from the grocery store!"

 We finally put the tree up last night.  It is our biggest tree yet.  I finally remembered to buy two more strands of lights this year, so it is also our best-lit tree ever.  Other years have been rather pathetic.

 Can you see the Perler bead ornaments?  Joe made the duck and the snowman.

 For the feast of St. Nicholas this year, I decided that instead of candy I would buy each of the kids an ornament for the tree as their gift from St. Nick.  I found six beautiful ornaments at the Madonna House gift shop.  Hannah's is by far the most precious:  a crystal adorned with seed beads depicting a cardinal in the winter.  For $60 I could have bought all twelve days of Christmas in the same style - they were exquisite and out of my price range.

 This tiny hand knit sweater was well worth the money.  It belongs to Sarah.

 Joe, not satisfied with his first card nor his heart ornament, wrote me yet another card.  Four love trees growing on a cold winter day.  Yet more heartfelt gratitude for his birth and thank you written in bubbles.  I was happy for that last clarification as I was a little unsure what all the small circles were, especially when so many of them seemed to form eights.  Don't age me prematurely, son.

And lest I forget that advent doesn't culminate in the birth of Elena, here is our prayer table awaiting the birth of the Christ Child.  And the unfortunate green wall.

Slightly deeper thoughts

Last night I had an hour long conversation with my best friend from university.  We met almost 20 years ago when we were just seventeen and entering our first year of university at Dalhousie.  We are both almost 37; could we then have imagined our seventeen-year-old selves in twenty years?  I don't know.  Life moves so very quickly and in such unexpected directions.

She and her husband have been married one year longer than Dave and I and have four kids under ten.  She also works full-time in a ministry to women who are coming out of drug addiction and off the streets.  Many of these women are pregnant or have young children and babies.  It's a wonderful ministry, take a look.

My friend and I met at an Intervarsity Christian Fellowship meeting during frosh week.  I attended at the behest of my Hindu friend, now a Christian.  I had made some decisions not to live the typical life of an undergrad and had lost my immediate friends as a consequence.  Thus, I found myself at a praise and worship meeting surrounded by Protestants.  At the time I didn't realize what a rare bird I was, a Catholic who was actually a "Christian".  Apparently, the group leaders had been praying for such a person to show up and I seemed to be the answer to their ecumenical prayer.  What followed was quite beautiful:  my faith came alive as I claimed it personally and these wonderful Protestants never once discouraged me from remaining a Catholic.  In fact, many of them, especially my best friend, were incredibly open to the teachings of the Church.  Teachings that I barely understood at the time.

I remember sitting in my attic bedroom with two of these friends listening to Janet Smith's cassette tape (now I'm dating myself!), Contraception, why not.  I had stumbled across the tape and, having listened to it, was zealous to share its reasoned arguments and flawless logic.  Both friends listened
with open minds.  One, in the nursing program, was inspired to work her term project around the unknown side-effects of hormonal birth control and the advantages of Natural Family Planning.  I have since lost contact with this friend, although I know that she is married with children and working as a nurse in her home country of Bermuda.  (Some of us are closer to heaven than others.)

The other friend took the Church's teachings on life and allowed herself to be changed by them.  What brought this to mind was something that my friend said in last  night's conversation.  She was telling me that their babysitter is a young woman in the nursing program at the local university.  She is Protestant and has become heavily involved in the pro-life group at the university.  She told my friend that she was really surprised that the pro-life movement seems to be mainly Catholics.  "Did you know that the Catholics are pro-life?" she exclaimed.  "Did you know that hormonal birth control is making its way into our water system?"  My good friend laughed and replied, "You're surrounded by Catholics; you don't know the half of it yet!"

I smiled and thought about all of those wonderful Protestant friends who helped form my faith at such a crucial time in my life.  I am so very thankful for them and their witness.  But, there is one thing.  As we slowly began to graduate from our three and four-year undergrads, many of us married within five years or so of our leaving the university.  But, only one of us had children quickly.  (Don't jump all over me, I'm just questioning some basic and mainline assumptions about marriage and family.). Can you guess who?  (No, not better, just different...)

I recall running into a friend from the group one Christmas when I had returned to visit my parents.  The twins were almost three and I was pregnant with Benjamin.  In aisle 2 of the local grocery store, her jaw dropped when I mentioned that I was having my third child.  Congratulations were as far from her lips as birth control was from mine.  "But what about your marriage?" she asked.  She and her husband had been married two years or so and she simply couldn't imagine how kids could fit in.  Embarrassingly, I didn't know what to answer, "Uh, our marriage is still there?"

Another friend and her husband, dedicated to full-time Christian ministry, visited Dave and me at my parents' house when I was expecting the twins.  We were only 7 months married, and she and her husband were genuinely concerned that all was well between us.  A child, let alone two, how could that possibly be indicative of a happy marriage?  All I could do was encourage them to maybe try out the pro-creation route as well.

After last night's conversation, one more memory came to mind.  I was in my third year of university and two of the Christian Fellowship members had just married immediately after graduation.  One of the leaders of the group gathered us in a smaller group and asked for prayers for a serious intention.  I waited, expecting the worst.  Instead, I heard that this couple had conceived a child on their honeymoon - quelle horreure!  At the age of 19, and largely unschooled in my Church's grand and beautiful theology of the family, I instinctively knew that something was very, very wrong with these people's worldview.  I felt sad and distanced from their fellowship.

How easily so many dedicated followers of Christ have allowed the zeitgeist to infect their understanding of marriage and family life.  If life begins at conception, then it goes without question that all things anti-life begin with contraception.  How easily they had accepted babies as burdens rather than gifts.

How different it is to watch the undergrads and alumni of our local Catholic Academy.  At most, OLSWA has had 90 students at a time.  But, when they come back for their alumni gatherings, their numbers swell.  So many are married a few years and arrive back in the Bay towing a toddler and a baby seat.  This is normal, expected and celebrated.  A culture of life, indeed.  They don't look any different than their secular counterparts - they are paragons of stylishness - except for their wedding rings and offspring.  The image they present is strikingly different than my Christian friends from university who married early and had kids late.  Truthfully, their lives don't look any different than those of the culture; the culture that they are supposed to challenge and revitalize by the radical nature of their lives.

I don't know how to end this.  It's not an attack, more of a lament.  We're not crazy for rejecting birth control and abortion.  In fact, we're the sanest people around; also, some of the most joyful.  As I creep closer to 40, I realize that childbearing comes to an end.  Sometimes far too quickly; all things really do have their season.  Have children, enjoy children, love children - there's really nothing quite like them.  Why settle for a life of comfort, the ego-drama, when you can live the theo-drama?  It promises you so much more than you could ever dream of.  And to the woman in the grocery store who recently rubbed her stomach and with raised eyebrows told me, "It's nice to see you, you know... not pregnant.":  Harden not your heart.

The kids are still funny

Well, at least these children are.  Actually, I think that all children are quite funny, if we listen closely.  I spend almost all of my waking hours in the presence of one or more of our six kids.  Sarah, at two and half, has already demonstrated a developing sense of humour, if only through the use of facial expressions (especially her eyebrows).

Isaac has the wildest imagination of the bunch, to the point that I often wonder if he understands that his imagination is not actually reality.  (I am not well-versed enough in child psychology to fully understand the realm of the imagination and reality in Isaac's age-set.  I imagine that it is quite blurred.)  On that note, I have stopped counting the number of times his paternal grandfather has solved small domestic problems by shooting a gun with Isaac's help.  Recently we had to take Isaac in hand over his imaginative use of artillery.  For example, Hannah tells me that on the way to school she and her siblings passed a police car stopped at a house.  The policeman was outside of his car talking with the owner of the home.  Isaac, without thought to authority, yelled out, "What are you doing?"  The policeman donned his friendly, community-minded face and called back, "Hey, little buddy, on your way to school?"  To which Isaac, thankfully just out of earshot, replied, "I'm going to shoot you!  Bang!  Bang!" Hannah, in great haste, grabbed his hand before it began to fire, and yelled out with a smile fixed on her gentle face, "He said, 'I'm going to school!  Bye!  Bye!"  Later, when I asked Isaac about the encounter, he told me that the policeman was stealing the house owner's baby and Isaac needed to stop the evil policeman.

Benjamin, usually without intention, is quite the humourist.  The four oldest arrived home from school a few weeks ago yelling at me simultaneously that they had taken first place in the Legion Remembrance Day poster and poetry contest.  Except for Ben.  Ben traipsed in the door with an angry and resentful look.  He mumbled that he thought that maybe the contest judges had decided that Ben was in favour of war due to the significant presence of artillery and planes dropping bombs detailed on his poster.  I left it at that until later in the evening when I asked him if I could see the offending poster.  He pulled it out of his bag and unrolled the poster board.  In fact, there were numerous airplanes dropping bombs onto two graveyards:  one filled with tombstones and the other with crosses and poppies.  Separating the cemeteries was a giant malformed peace sign looming ominously in the background.  (Symbolic of a failed peace accord?)  However, the giant caption hastily written across the top of the poster provided the key to Ben's failure to place in the contest.  In eight-year-old-boy bubble letters, it read, "There (sic) still There!". Through my laughter, I asked him what he could have possibly meant by such a slogan.  He explained that he was trying to convey the message that the soldiers, while dead and in their graves, are still with us in heaven.  A noble concept, I thought.  I couldn't resist suggesting that he enter the same poster next year with a different slogan:  Still Haven't Moved!


And to finish this off:  Jacob.  On the weekend, Jacob looked over my shoulder and found me accidentally having clicked on that ad for the seventy-year-old grandma who, through some at-home technique, had shaved thirty years off her age and now looks forty.  (You know the one.)  Without missing a beat, I heard Jacob tell Hannah, "Mom's looking at that grandma who looks forty.  I guess she wants to look ten."  Seven, Jacob, I still have three years to go...
Enjoy your day.

New haircuts

 New haircuts ... and I no longer have a baby.  Amazing how one haircut can add a year or more to a child's age.

 She was unimpressed with the hair salon and the only way she would sit still was to play on the iPad while enduring the snip snip of the scissors.  After the haircut, Isaac scowled and said he didn't like the new Sarah.  Another male with a long-hair fixation?

 I chopped off a whole lot of hair.  This is the new hairstyle at its best; I am completely unable to achieve this on a daily basis.  Also, my hair used to be brown as a child; it seems to have become black with age.  Interesting.

 A better view of the bob.  We convinced Sarah that it was a good thing by telling her that she looks like her hero, Dora the Explorer.

 The bangs were a bad idea and already growing out.  Sarah is 'blessed' with a double cowlick making bangs almost impossible.

She's not always happy about getting her picture taken and often throws up one hand in resistance while yelling, "Don't look at me!"  Perhaps her haircut's ability to add years to her age is merely expressing her teenage-like attitude.

Joseph is Seven!

 Joseph turned seven on the 28th of November ... and somehow we are left with two measly photos.  Where exactly did the birthday video disappear to?  Our photos seem to be becoming progressively worse:  ill-lit, the ever-present neon green wall as background, and grainy, always grainy.  But, guess what?  It really doesn't matter.  We are left with two photos and one delightful Joseph.

 Dear Joseph has a very special relationship with my Madonna House spiritual director, Fr. Tom - a sort of spiritual grandfather.  Joe loves Fr. Tom deeply and I suspect that the feeling is mutual.  So, when I asked Joe what he wanted to do on his birthday, he requested Fr. Tom for supper.  (Well, Joe wanted hamburgers for supper, not Fr. Tom:  you know what I mean?)  Fr. Tom came for the evening and we feasted on hamburgers, nachos with cheese, Greek salad and a store-bought cake.  The last part was a big Whew! moment for the kids, as my cakes are not something with which one would want to celebrate.

 Aside from turning seven, Joe (and Ben) got to start sledge hockey this winter.  Joe's best friend Chad has spina bifida, and one of the most infectious personalities around.  I suspect that his personality comes directly from his mother, one of the happiest, most positive-thinking women I know.  She and her husband decided that Chad, if unable to play able-bodied hockey, would not miss out.  Thus, sledge hockey has come to our little town.  Our boys have always wanted to play hockey, but we have been resistant to the thought of thousands of dollars in equipment and early mornings spent at freezing arenas.  Therefore, when a sledge hockey form came home from school (with a low price tag and a commitment of 1.5 hours each Saturday) we jumped at the idea.

The nicest part of sledge hockey so far has been the group of kids and parents involved.  (And maybe that Dave takes the boys and I get to stay home.)  Other than Chad, all of the kids are able-bodied, and just really nice kids.  The normal hockey culture on ice and in the locker room is completely absent and a more humble spirit permeates the practices.  Even Chad's educational assistant from the school has joined the team, all of 50-plus years old.  We are so grateful for these opportunities in our life:  little ways in which our kids get to grow up just a little bit differently than the pervasive culture. But, moreover, we are simply thankful for these kids, each irrepeatable, unique and exactly the right fit for our family.