kings, rooks, pawns, Jesus

The husband has been teaching Harper to play chess. She, in turn, has been teaching Hudson to play "chess". She was showing him how to set up the board:

Harper: Okay, this is the good king, and this is the knight, and this is the bad king and..

Hudson: Where is Jesus?

Where is Jesus, indeed. Come to think of it, has anyone ever come up with a Christian chess set? Seems like that might work nicely, what with all the emperors and shepherds and wise men and sword-wielding disciples. And I'll bet you it would sell like gangbusters at the Christian bookstore. They could put it right between those prints of George Washington bowing down before the cross and the Test-a-mints.

I consider it one of my great failings as a mother (so far) that I do things for my children instead of taking the time to teach them to do for themselves. I'm trying to work on it but it gets to the heart of the Great Tension Within Me, which is that I am the rather lethal combination of A Lazy Perfectionist. It's like there are two voices going in my head at any given moment, one of them sneering, "Is THAT the BEST you can do??" and the other (this voice is a kindly, old British woman for some reason) saying, "Well, then, best go take a wee nap." It's exhausting, as you can imagine. Even after I take my nap.

I am reading two books at the same time and they couldn't be more different, yet I'm enjoying both of them (hm, another example of my split personality?). One is a fairly new biography of Deitrich Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, titled (and subtitled, and subtitled again) Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentile vs. The Third Reich
. It is currently 4 days overdue and I should, therefore, turn it in tomorrow, which means I need to read approximately 400 pages before I go to bed tonight. Hm. Perhaps I will break my rule of No More Buying Books Because When We Move The Books Become An Albatross About My Neck. As an aside, there are many, many things about grand fancy houses that do not appeal to me one bit, but the thought of having my very own library in my very own house from which I will never have to move seems heavenly. And I do not use that word lightly. Anyway, the other book is Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr, who is particularly interesting to me because she graduated from my high school 15 years before I did. Our dads both worked at an oil refinery, but that seems to be the extent of our common experience. Lit is her memoir of her journey through alcoholism, and it's a compelling story, compellingly told. Sad, but ultimately she finds her way out. Out of Port Neches AND out of alcohol. And into the Catholic church, apparently, but I'm not quite there yet.

My sweet Aunt Sue died a week ago today. She was my mom's big sister and she called me "Pooh" even after I grew up. She made extraordinarily good turkey and cornbread dressing. She loved her family well. She told good stories and loved to laugh. As I pondered my lingering sadness this morning before communion, I realized anew that the deaths of those we love is so agonizing not just because we miss them, but because we simply were not made to die. We were made for eternity and communion. Not for death and separation. C.S. Lewis writes that fish do not complain of the sea for being wet. We have the curse (the gift?) to recognize we are strangers here (in reverent fear). The sea is wet, and we are cold and weary with the swim.

So. I'm off to Bonhoeffer. True fellowship, true community, radical theology and oh, by the way, we need to kill Hitler. The sea is WET.

Dare you to move

The husband has been leaving his old ipod in the car which gives us a delightfully eclectic music selection. There are two Switchfoot songs and the kids really like them, probably because they are So Rockin' compared to what we usually listen to. It cracks me up to hear Hudson singing an octave up when it gets too low ("we want more than the wars of our fathers, and EVERYTHING INSI-I-DE, SCREAMS FOR SECOND LIFE! We were meant to live for SO much MO-ORE!!)and Harper, on our way to Target this morning was having her little bean bag spider sing, and it was at a range and decibel level where only dolphins are comfortable, so I finally had to turn down "Dare You to Move" and tell Spidery that, while I truly enjoyed his performance, it was starting to pierce my eardrums and could he maybe PLEASE turn it down a little. All of Harper's stuffed animals have super creative names like Spidery and Stingray-ee, and Beary. She has several rocks named Rocky. All the dogs are named Sasha. And there is Object the Snail, Twinkle the Star, and Car the Pumpkin.

Coming out of Target I saw a large fellow in an even larger t-shirt with this emblazoned on it:

MY WALLET IS LIKE MY [word that means female dog]...THICK!!

Now, this fellow was walking with a lady friend. They were both scowling. Which is shocking, I realize. Although, come to think of it, why was he scowling? Because a trip to Target should be fun if one has a thick wallet. Well, I'll be. I just looked up 'thick' in an online slang dictionary and guess what it means?? It means 'attractive'!!! How about that? Well, then, neither of them should have been scowling. Here I've been judging. These kids today and their effusive, enigmatic double entendre t-shirt praise. Here's to a long and loving future for those two.

I've begun to look for houses. We may or may not be thinking about moving when our lease here is up in July. So it is way too early to start looking, of course. But I can't seem to help myself.

Wanted: an old but renovated house with mature trees and a yard and no roaches that is not in the suburbs and is very cheap.

I've been watching lots of HGTV after everyone is in bed and I have learned that I will have to make compromises because this is an impossible wish list for Houston. So it looks like I may have to shift my expectations a little.

Wanted: Cheap, no roaches.

In the words of Switchfoot, "We want more than this world's got to offer. We want more than this world's got to offer." Oh, maybe that's not really what the song means. Maybe I'm too thick to understand their lyrics. And by thick I mean, of course, really attractive.

Ten books we've lately loved

1. The Poodle Who Barked at the Wind by Charlotte Zolotow, ill. June Otari
2. The Seashore Book by Charlotte Zolotow, ill. Wendell Minor
3. The Sleepy Book by Charlotte Zolotow, ill.Stefano Vitale
4. The Quiet Mother and the Noisy Little Boy by Charlotte Zolotow, ill. Marc Simont
5. Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present by Charlotte Zolotow, ill. Maurice Sendak
6. I Like to be Little by Charlotte Zolotow, ill. Eric Blegvad

So, thanks to Zoe, we discovered Charlotte Zolotow. And I love her, especially I Like to be Little, because it reminds me of my childhood aspiration to never grow up, and The Quiet Mother and the Noisy Little Boy, because it reminds me that, even though my life is often quite noisy, I'm glad I did, finally, grow up.

7. Hugless Douglas by David Melling (A young bear wakes from hibernation in desperate need of a hug. I had never heard of this author but hope to read more of him.)

8. The Tub People by Pam Conrad, ill. Richard Egielski (I love books that pretend toys come to life when we aren't looking. We also loved The Rooster's Gift by Pam Conrad, about a rooster who is convinced he is responsible for causing the sun to rise, but who realizes that he is simply heralding the inevitable. Also recommended by Zoe.)

9. On Market Street by Anita and Arnold Lobel (These illustrations are splendid in this ingenious ABC book, and the kids were especially delighted by the cameo appearance of Lobel's Frog and Toad on the Toys page.

10. The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Eugene Trivizas, ill. Helen Oxenbury (the point-of-view shift is amusing, as is the fact that the Pig is finally transformed by a beautiful house of wildflowers that fills his nose with a lovely scent as he prepares to huff and puff.)

I mentioned in the last post that Harper and I have been reading the Little House series during our reading time. We have just started Farmer Boy, which is the third book. It's such a different experience reading these books as an adult. I am totally over-identifying with Caroline, and have cried several times while reading aloud, much to Harper's bafflement. I just can't imagine how hard it must have been for her. These have been the tear-inducers thus far:

--When Pa has to jump in the swollen river to save the wagon and she has to grab the reins with her husband and their horses about to drown and Laura and Mary and baby Carrie in the back of the wagon (with NO CARSEATS!!!)
--When she leaves her extended family behind in the Big Woods, travels across the country, and knows that she likely won't have any communication with them for a very long, long time.
--When the (possibly savage) Indians come in while Pa is away and she cooks cornbread for them.
--When Pa decides, WITHOUT CONSULTING HER, to leave the house on the prairie that they have labored over for an entire year, just as they have planted their crops...

And I didn't cry over this part, but I certainly felt mighty convicted:

--When she washes their clothes AND IRONS THEM while they are traveling from Wisconsin to Kansas (far, it is very far, we looked at the map) in a covered wagon. AND she cooks. AND bakes. AND washes dishes. For weeks and weeks and weeks. Every single meal. Over a camp fire. And, meanwhile, I whine about unloading the dishwasher. Sheesh.

Susan the corncob doll

This is the slightly blurry photo that made it on to the Christmas card.

For the third time this week, I am having leftover pizza and M&M's for lunch. Not pertinent really. The Christmas M&M's were marked down to $2 a bag at Target. I'm lamenting I only bought one.

Just now as I was getting a healthy (no pizza or M&M's) lunch ready for the kids, I looked out the window and noted to Harper, with mild reproach, that she had left her scooter outside in the rain yesterday. "Oh well," she said carelessly, "I don't really play with it MUCH anymore anyway." Which is a sentiment that pretty much sums up why I loathe myself for venturing from the "something you want, something you need, something to wear, something to read" plan for Christmas this year. We just finished reading the chapter in Little House on the Prairie when their bachelor neighbor Mr. Edwards braves the swollen creek to bring each of the girls a tin cup, a little cake, a candy cane and a penny. And Laura and Mary were in raptures. Over a tin cup, a little cake, a candy cane, and a penny. I guarantee Laura, for all her naughty thoughts, would have never left her Lightning McQueen scooter out in the rain. And in Little House in the Big Woods she has a corn cob for a doll, for crying out loud. And she loves it.

So, aside from all of my existential angst, Christmas was nice. Harper, Grandmother Pate and I went to see the Houston Ballet's "Nutcracker" with our friends the Swanks:



Harper was mesmerized through the entire performance, and it only solidified her desire to someday become a ballerina who raises stingrays in her spare time.

Hudson got two play guns for Christmas:
Which can be exhausting:

Helena got a stuffed puppy of her very own and also has discovered a freckle on the bottom of her foot that she needs to examine several time a day.

And our backyard is full of tallow leaves, which are rather pretty and also good for jumping:

Blind Wally and the Christmas Miracle

A couple of weeks ago, I was getting dinner together when the door bell rang. It was a lady who'd been out for a walk and had noticed a dog in our front yard. She wondered if he was ours. I am afraid I was rather emphatic that the dog DID NOT belong to us. "I think he's blind," she said sadly. In my infinite mercy for stray animals with life altering disabilities, I suggested she ask the people across the street if they recognized him. Then the husband went out to supervise our relinquishment of any and all responsibility for another stray beast. The neighbors offered to keep the dog in their back yard, because they are kinder than we, obviously. Then, I'm slightly embarrassed to admit, I forgot all about the stray blind dog because I could. He wasn't in my back yard, you see.

So, five days later, the kids and I were walking to the park and we stopped at a red light to wait for our turn to cross the street. I saw a flier taped on the light pole. LOST DOG. I stepped closer, and saw "This is Wally. He is BLIND. Please call if you've seen him!" I made the kids get off their bikes and I called the number, leaving a message that Wally was (hopefully) in our neighbors' back yard. When we got home from the park, I saw a lady and a boy about Harper's age holding an empty leash across the street. She asked if I were Patti, then thanked me profusely and told me she had been grieving for five days, sure that blind Wally had come to a sad end. That she had given up hope. That she really saw this as a Christmas miracle. I'm just glad that, even though I hadn't sacrificed much, I got to play a part in the sweet reunion. There's a lesson embedded there somewhere, right?

What is not a Christmas miracle is that I still have not ordered my Christmas cards. We have one decent picture of all of us, and I can't make it fit into the one template (out of hundreds I perused) I decided is the only one I like. Then I asked the husband if we might just try to take another picture, this one more conducive to a square. And maybe he did or maybe he did not cuss. So then today when everyone was all gussied up for church I though maybe I could get a cute one of the kids by themselves and that would do. Well:





So, I'm off to the tiny prints web-site to make one last effort. I think I may have to cut off part of the husband's head, which, now that I think about it, is pretty emblematic of how he feels when we try to take a family picture. So, apropos.

Sweep in heavenly peace

I've been working on a short story, and by "working on" I mean that I have come up with a title but have yet to actually put any words on the paper, about a mother (no one you know, any similarities with any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental) who realizes that she craves silence so acutely that she turns simple activities that should take only a few seconds, like taking out the recycling, or walking around the front of the minivan to get in after she's strapped in the children, into 10-15 minute Events to Savor The Quiet. The story will be told in third person, naturally, because I can't really identify with a character like that.

We have been trying to stop television. This morning's methadone dose involved dry pinto beans and pearl barley on cookie sheets. Helena, meanwhile, studied her solar system flash cards with her thinking cap on:
(ha. In actuality, she was enslaved in the gray play yard you see behind her in that picture, because Helena + pearl barley and dried pinto beans = EPIC FAIL) And it's possible that I took advantage of this time to take an inordinately long shower, which is possibly another activity that should take a few minutes but instead takes many more because of the Blessed Silence it provides. I mean, hypothetically, of course. Because I am nothing like the mother in my short story. Pure fiction.

We spent the rest of the morning with some new friends at the heretofore undiscovered by us wonderland that is the indoor playscape at a nearby Baptist church. They invite you to play even if you don't go to church there, which is very Christian of them. If I think too much about how much something like that costs, it makes me want to sell my every possession, move to Angola or Nicaragua or Rwanda, and dig wells with the Living Water people. Because in the 2 hours my healthy kids climbed and slid and bounced and delighted themselves, approximately 480 kids across the world DIED because they don't have access to clean water. Yeah. Remember in my last post when I wrote that it is loud in my head? Loud.

When I was cleaning up the pearl barley and pinto beans before dinner, I was balancing the cookie sheet on one hand to get the overflow from the tabletop and I thought to myself, "Wow, it would be a disaster to drop this right now!" so of course, about 2 seconds later, I did drop it, and I can't really convey without a complex physics equation how far and wide will pearl barley and beans scatter when unleashed on a hardwood floor. It was impressive. I pretty much had it swept up and went to find something to act as a dustpan, because I don't know where ours is, and while I was searching, Helena, who had been "helping" me sweep, got into the pile and spread it back all over the floor.

Speaking of cookies, I went to a Christmas cookie exchange at my friend Merry's house last night and it was magnificent. I'm guessing around 40 women, aged 30-80, wine, great conversation, and so many delectable cookies to sample and bring home. I have eaten upwards of a dozen today alone. Some were tiny, but some were not.

Sleepy, Dopey, Grumpy.

Well, I have been quite a joy lately. The husband is finishing up a semester in which he has taught a night class two nights a week, which has meant he leaves just after the kids wake up and does not get home until after they are in bed. As much as I do indeed love and cherish my dear children, by Wednesday night of each week I found their every word and deed Incredibly Annoying and my ability to suppress this Extreme Annoyance was nil. I am aware that my temporary situation is a full-time reality for many women, and they have my deep respect and compassion.

The Christmas season also makes me irritable, and then I am irritable because I am irritable. It is loud in my head.

Hudson woke up this morning and was saying, "You've GOT to be KIDDING me!" about everything, which is funny in and of itself, but patently hysterical when his actual pronunciation is along the lines of, "you DOT to be TIDDEN me!" He has been doing more than his usual amount of stomping around with a scowl on his face when there is absolutely not one thing wrong, and I've heard rumors that there is some kind of testosterone surge that happens to boys soon to be four years old, and I suppose that makes good sense. Here he is with a very gun-shaped stick he picked up at the park today and brought home in his jeans pocket. He is also wearing the Daddy's headlamp:He is VERY interested in guns and knives, and has no idea what the majority of mankind actually DOES with guns and knives. Which reminds me that up until this week, when Harper would see someone smoking a cigarette, she would say, "Oh, that lady is enjoying a lollipop!" and I would not correct her, for the same reasons, I suppose, that I don't correct her when she exclaims, upon seeing the smokestacks at the refineries, belching out whatever smoky byproduct it is they belch out, "Cloud makers!! Mommy, that's where the clouds are made!!!" Anyway, yesterday she asked me what a cigarette was. And I asked her where she learned that word and she said from the book about Officer Buckles and Gloria, and he tells the kids, as one of his safety tips, to Stay Away From Cigarettes, a sentence I had skipped over when I read it aloud. Now that she can read, she is going to discover all of the spontaneous editing I do as I read. Anyway, I told her that cigarettes are tobacco leaves wrapped up in white paper and that some grownups like to set them on fire and breath in the smoke but that it wasn't a very healthy habit because our lungs don't work as well as they should with smoke in them. She wandered away at that point. Maybe to go smoke a cigarette, I don't know.

Harper has mastered monkey bars this month, and likes to use it as a verb: "Friend, would you like to monkey bar with me?" she will ask at the park. One day last week our neighbor was over to admire Hudson's drums and he asked Harper if she played any instruments and she replied, "I play piano, harmonica..." and she kind of gazed off into the distance running through the orchestra considering which others she could claim. Harper and Hudson are both infatuated with our neighbors, who are a sweet young couple, newly married. They will stand on the top of the slide peering into their back yard, sometimes singing a little ditty they like to call "Mr. Golightly! Come outside!" Only when Hudson says it, it sounds like Mistuh Dough-yite-yee. When there is a Mistuh Dough-yite-yee sighting, everyone comes running in, breathless and giddy. One day I overheard them making a list of grown-ups who are invited to our house. Mr. Golightly made the list, as did army men and ballerinas and Bear Grylls and karate men and hunters and Survivor Man. I am sorry if you are not on the list. I am not either, apparently.

Last Sunday when everyone was dressed and ready for church, Hudson made a proclamation: "The boys have to be cool and the girls have to be bootiful. That. Is. The point. That is the RULE."

Helena has reached the developmental stage I refer to as "octopus arms". She has realized there is an entire world above her head, heretofore unnoticed and she is determined to partake of it. It's hard to remember to push things out of her reach--on the table, on the kitchen cabinets, on my desk. She has also discovered that if she wants to defer the unpleasantness of a diaper or clothing change for a few minutes, she need only stand up on the changing table and wrap her arms around me for a sweet hug. I will usually stand there for a few minutes rubbing her velvet back, until the sweetness can no longer mask the stench, at which point I have to perform a half Nelson to get her in position. If only a hug could wipe away the poo. Alas.

I have decided that I can no longer hide my disdain for the Berenstain Bears books. I think it was Monday when Harper plopped down a huge stack of them and she and Hudson snuggled in and we made it through four and we were almost to the end of one about pollution and recycling and I read, "And Brother and Sister Bear realized that their Clean the Earth club blabbedy blaggedy blah blah BLAH! And they all picked up their litter and recycled and the world was TIDY and CLEAN THE END NO MORE BERENSTAIN BEARS TODAY. I'M SORRY BUT I CAN'T READ ANOTHER WORD OF THIS PEDANTIC INSIPID TEXT. I SIMPLY REFUSE!!" Okay, maybe I didn't really say 'pedantic'. And honestly, I don't mind the older ones like The New Baby and The Spooky Old Tree. But whenever they started writing Issue Books--blech, the quality of the writing is just poor. I told Harper she can read as many of them as she wants to, as long as she is the one reading them and not me. I'm sorry Stan and Jan (and Mike), I am sure you are lovely people and I'm glad you are very rich.

That will be all. I'm thinking about starting another blog to review the grown-up books I've been reading lately. Of course, I'm also thinking about learning to play the cello and mastering the art of watercolor portraiture. So. Life is short, art is long.