The Torch

You are the dead. Long years ago
you fought, and died, were laid below
the crosses, there in Flanders Field.
Ninety Novembers now have pealed
Church bells and speeches for the dead
by dwindling rank of comrades led,
to honor you - - John McCrae,
and all who stood in danger's way.

Your poem -- it haunts me now as when
I memorized first, at ten.
(So many children have). But I
-- I hear the larks sing in the sky
and shiver at the dead below
the crosses, laid in Flanders Field.

...And wonder at the final verse.
Would you have thought of us the worse?
Have we kept faith? Is our torch bright?
Or are we too ashamed to fight,
call evil false or good things true
like those young men who stood with you
to Flanders Field.

We are the living - you are the Dead,
not for you the poppies red,
blooming today for us below.
This ragged torch is burning low
but brave young men can still be found
hallowing some foreign ground
with earnest blood, while I at home
peck away at my short poem.
Lt. Col. John McCrae-
remember us, this November day.


Reposted from last year, in memory of John McCrae and all those who have died for honor, country, and freedom.

Why I Love Halloween

I love Halloween. I always have.

When I was a child, I loved Halloween for the same reasons as children everywhere. The fun of dressing up and, of course, the free candy. The adventure of going to so many houses and being out after dark. The delightful thrill of pretending to be scared of the spooky decorations and spooky costumes. My parents were less openly enthusiastic, but I know my mother's creative side enjoyed coming up with new ways to use our costume pieces each year, and my father drove us (we were country kids) from house to house without complaint.

Now that I'm a parent myself, I have found some new reasons to love this autumn occasion. Here are my top 5 reasons to love Halloween for grown-ups:

1) No housecleaning. I love thanksgiving and Christmas as much as anyone, but honestly, isn't it stressful trying to get the house into holiday condition? Halloween doesn't require inside hospitality, and it's not one of those holidays that calls for photo-perfect indoor backgrounds. Instead, throw a couple pumpkins on the porch and a paper ghost on your door and you're good to go! Is any other holiday so easy on the keeper of the home?

2) No cooking. Yes, I know the Martha Stewart types violate this and #1 by hosting halloween parties with themed dishes and decorations. What can I say? I'm no Martha Stewart. And fortunately, no one expects me to be. A variety pack of mini chocolate bars in a bowl, and your duty to the costumed masses is satisfied.

3) The creative outlet. I really enjoy planning my kid's costumes, even when they are nothing more elaborate than a letter pinned on a shirt and a blanket/cape around the shoulders. I keep face paint in the house year round as a fun thing to play with on rainy or dull days. Halloween takes that fun and expands upon it as little or as much as you like and have energy for.

4) Meet the neighbors - pressure free. Halloween is like speed dating for neighborhood adults. Greeting each other while the kids root through the candy bowl looking for the best treats allows just enough time to be friendly and catch up a bit, but not enough time to make any embarrassing social blunders.

5) The chocolate. C'mon, admit it. Deep inside, the kid in me still finds it magical that so many people just give candy away! For free! To strangers who come to their door. It's wonderful to be on the giving side too. Giving and getting something for nothing can make everyone involved feel good about the world and their place in it.

So tell me...do you love Halloween?

Geek Humor

From XKCD

Ambitions

When I was a child, my ambition was to be a concert pianist, or a singer, or maybe a psychologist. (Seriously. When I was 10, I wanted to be a psychologist. I was a weird 10 year old.)

But pretty much from the age of 15, my ambition has been to be a stay at home mom, like my mother.

These days, my ambitions all have to do with what kind of SAHM I want to be. There are sub-genres, you see. And I've been thinking about these ambitions more as I gather materials and try to prepare for our first real year of homeschooling.

These are hopes, really, plans I'm making that I recognize could fall by the wayside at any point (or never materialize at all) - but I'm laying them out here to remind me what I'm striving for.

1. I want to be a predictable mom and teacher with regular routines and a pre-planned schedule.
My son frankly requires that I cultivate the small part of myself that thrives on order and routine - because HE thrives on order and routine. This is the boy who asks me every evening and every morning, "what do we do on this day?" I need to have an answer for him that doesn't have me extemporizing and desperately improvising every day.

2. I want to be a decent housekeeper.
Maybe this will happen if I build it into those routines we were just talking about?

3. I want to cultivate small adventures.
So that those routines and schedules don't become an excuse to stay in and do what is easy rather than what is memorable.

4. I want to fuel this all with daily prayer.
Even if the daily prayer is a single Memorare a day.

What are your ambitions for this school year?

Life lessons

I mentioned in another post that my Handsome Husband has a new job. There's a story (maybe 2 or 3) to this job, and a lesson. Maybe even an aphorism or two. ;-) Let's start with a corny saying:

"When life closes a door, God opens a window."

In this case, Handsome left his previous full time job early in the new year when a hip injury required him to avoid strenuous physical activity for a while. By the time he recovered enough to go back to work, the company was no longer in a position to rehire him. To tell the truth, I'm not really sure what we've been living off of these last 8 months.

But during the time Handsome was sidelined by his physical condition, he found himself volunteering for a position he would NEVER have contemplated had he not had more time on his hands than he knew what to do with: chairing the parish building committee. Which was, at that point, pretty much non-existent.

Which leads us to the next lesson:

When you don't know what to do, do what you love.

Taking on the building committee had no immediate tangible benefit for our family, other than giving Handsome a way to feel useful during an otherwise frustrating time. But my husband has a passion for old buildings, and a passion for his Faith, and this offered a way to satisfy both of those loves.

Along the way, we realized something else - that Handsome's passions also qualified him to give more in that position than anyone else available. And that what the restoration of the church building really needed was someone with passion, someone with vision, and someone with the requisite experience and connections to squeeze every drop from the available funds. The task was (and is) a full time task and it needed full time attention from someone... like my husband.

It took 5 more months after that realization before Handsome was able to turn his volunteer position into full time employment, but eventually his passion convinced everyone involved, from the pastor to the diocesan building office to the bishop.

Which leads to the next aphorism:

If at first you don't succeed...

...make another phone call. This one was hard for Handsome, I think. He doesn't like to make a nuisance of himself or seem too needy. But with so much going on, even with the pastor in his corner, it was a constant effort to keep the process of creating a job position moving along. Three times we were told it was just around the corner...next week, or the week after...sure to be approved...the funds were in an account... each time we got our hopes up, each time we picked ourselves up from our disappointment and kept on, through diocesan politics (ick!), parish drama, and just plain human failing. My husband was incredible, working all the time at whatever small contracts and odd jobs he could find, keeping the building committee afloat and getting people excited and involved the whole time, until finally there came the time that it really was all final, here's the paperwork, welcome to church employment. Welcome to our parish Sexton, the man in charge of the maintenance, restoration, and repair of our church buildings.

The best lesson of all:

God has a purpose.

We have been married for 5 years now, and so little has made sense during that time. Despite our faith that God has a plan for us, it has never been possible to really see that plan take shape. We fell into financial trouble in the very first year we were married, moved to our current location in the wake of those troubles, had a difficult landing here and some definite culture shock, endured soul searching as we looked for a parish home, went through a dry spell when we wondered when God was going to reveal His reason for keeping us here so far from our families, watched with trepidation as our new parish was thrust into the middle of a controversial diocesan parish restructuring.

But there is something exciting brewing, even outside of Handsome's new job, although that puts us right in the middle of it. This parish is on the verge of a great renewal - not just the facade, the building, though that is shaping up to be part of it. And now it is easy to see what we couldn't have seen before - how God worked to bring us to this place, to this parish, how He moved Hamdsome among the right people and the right places to learn everything he would need for this work, how God knocked him off his feet to slow him down long enough to open this door, and how He placed us among His people to be part of something larger than any individual piece.

This is an exciting time for us - exciting because of the new job, which is honestly a dream job in so many ways, a literal answered prayer - exciting also because of this glimpse into where trust and hope have brought us.

One last little note. A joke.

When Handsome was still pretty young, he heard God calling him to serve His Church. Being young, he assumed that the only way to answer that call was priestly ministry, and he spent years assuming that God would lead him into the seminary before God made it clear to him that He had other plans.

So now I joke that Handsome is sort of an inverted St. Francis of Assisi. Francis heard God call him to rebuild his church, and initially assumed that God meant him to literally rebuild a physical church, until God set him to rebuilding the CHURCH.

But Handsome thought God was asking him to build up the CHURCH and it turns out that what God had in mind was that he should rebuild a church, this one.

I'm sure Francis is amused. We certainly are.

Beauty Tips from the Toddler

It's not mess, Mama, it's a yoghurt facial!

If I smeared food on my face on a regular basis, do you think I'd get skin as smooth as his?

Every morning this week, no matter how poorly the day started, I have sipped my tea with the comforting thought, "well anyway, see how God loves me?"

Which He does. Of course He does. But this week I've had a little extra proof of it with every cup of tea.

You see, Liam started a new job last week. Which by itself is proof of God's constant provision, and I'll have to tell that story in another post. But the kicker has been that the new (salaried! Yay!) job is paid monthly. So we're going from the week-to-week, day-to-day cash flow of odd jobs and self-employment to trying to make do for a month until that first pay check.

Just about when I realized this meant we would have to be even more frugal than usual, I realized that I was down to my last couple of bags of tea. Which I simply could NOT justify replacing. Not when the $4 for another box of tea could be better spent on eggs or milk or fresh fruit. I resigned myself to stretching the last few pots as far as I could and doing without until September, but not without a quick exasperated mutter, "C'mon, really?" directed more or less at the ceiling.

Then I went back to worrying about other things. When I told my husband about the tea shortage later that day, it was more in the way of warning than complaint. I really didn't expect him to be able to do anything about it. So it was a bit surprising when he said, "you know, I think there is box of tea at the office that doesn't belong to anybody. I'll ask around. It's still in it's packaging, unopened, and it looks like it's been there a while."

It put a little spring in my step the next day to think that God, in his wisdom, may have provided tea to tide me over - a box of Lipton, or Red Rose, forgotten by some long-gone visitor to the office, waiting for this week to be a comfort to me.

But God, as is so often true, exceeded my every expectation. For what Liam brought home, after establishing that it really was unclaimed and unwanted by the rest of the denizens of his new workplace, was not a box of Lipton. It wasn't a generic 'orange pekoe', or a box of Red Rose.

No, what Liam brought home is proof positive that not only did God intend to provide for me, he knows me and LOVES me. Because what Liam brought home - what was sitting abandoned in a cupboard - was not a second-rate discount tea but a genuine box of loose-leaf good quality PG Tips!!

(PG Tips is a British tea - not fancy by any means, but much MUCH better in quality than anything of a comparative price here in the US. It's my preferred every day tea but I can only find it at Whole Foods and I've never found it loose leaf hereabouts.)

How awesome is that? God meets not only my needs, but even my wants. (Because, let's be honest, I really could have survived a month without tea). And then, to pile mercy upon mercy, He goes one step further and exceeds my hopes by meeting even my preferences. Like any perfect gift, the message is clear: I know you, and I love you.

So, things may be tight this month. They may be difficult. I may not always know how we are going to overcome each little crisis. But I do know that God will see to our every need.

I know, after all, how well He loves me.

Has it really been a month?

I guess blogging kind of fell off my radar this last month.

Can I give you a picture as a sort-of-apology?

Mommy Morning Math

Number of times this morning that I have...

...picked up the same laundry off the floor and placed it back into a basket: 3.
...asked my still undressed 4 year old to pick out some clothes and dress himself: 2.
...peeled super-velcro-sweet pea off so that I could accomplish something: 8.
...answered a question about butterflies: 4.
...picked up the same easy-reader books and placed them back on the bookshelf: 2.
...passed my teapot without the leisure to pour the first cup: 3.
...said, "yes, I hear you" after the zillionth repetition of something: some multiple of a zillion.
...tripped over or narrowly avoided tripping over toys in doorway: 4.

Tasks I have accomplished this morning:

2 breakfasts made and consumed (I ate a banana).
1 breakfast mess cleaned up.
1 load of laundry sorted, folded, and put away.
1 load laundry in the washer.
2 bags garbage taken out.
2 large trash cans moved to curb.
2 emails answered.
1 dryer rack of dishes from yesterday put away.

Great Is Thy Faithfulness

This hymn - not Catholic by any stretch, nor (for a change) English but an old protestant standby - has been on my heart and lips this week. Actually since last week. We suffered a bit of a dissapointment and I was bitterly upset, with the emphasis on bitter. So it makes no sense that I should find myself singing this song of praise and thanksgiving, except that I am. And in the Divine Economy, I'm sure it makes the kind of sense that eye has not seen, nor the mind of man comprehendeth.



You may find the words here.