Three Plus Two

Spring Term, Week 2: Winding Down

I keep whittling down my expectations of this year. I have marked on my calendar that June 18 will be our "last day of school".  This week I looked at our attendence calendar and realized that our 180 days will be done sooner than that.  Usually I don't pay too much attention to "just" getting in 180 days.  Instead, I like to keep working until natural breaks.  If that goes over 180 days, so be it.  But this year, I think I will be happy just to make 180.  We're stopping at the end of May and taking off June and July.  I'm not quite sure I understand the level of burnout this year, considering that I didn't have any babies, I wasn't pregnant, and we didn't move. Of course, I started the year wheezing, Chipmunk started walking (and climbing), and the twins were 3.  I guess that might make a fair case for burnout.

In any case, I'm trying to muster the strength to recover from our trip and Andy's heavy travel schedule, which will last until the end of May... add in 15 turkeys coming in two weeks, and 52 chickens after that, plus the garden... that's why we're winding down.   Here's what we did accomplish last week:

• I got some softball and T-ball equipment to replenish our stores.  The little boys have enjoyed playing catch, and Katydid has found a new interest in softball... and a new frustration when she can't get her brothers to play with her.  The library had a display on baseball, so she checked out Mighty Jackie: The Strike-Out Queen.  Not only is this a true story about a girl who strikes out Babe Ruth, but she also played for the Chattanooga Look-Outs, a city in which we recently spent some time. 
• The boys are all interested in dinosaurs... mammoths... prehistoric fish.  The little boys are enthralled with Chased By Dinosaurs and Gareth has been reading The Book of Life: An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth, Second Edition.  (You know... I link books sometimes so I can pull up actual titles and authors when I write my quarterly reports for the school district.  But sometimes the actual titles come out sounding a bit ridiculous.And I'm not really trying to make money at this.  Just so you know.)  We got a very cool book out of the library called Prehistoric Actual Size, which I'm hoping to use as a springboard for some outside measuring activities with the little boys this week.
• We started reading about Romans: Augustus Caesar's World and In Search of a Homeland: The Story of the Aeneid.
• Katydid started working on a Blurb book of her photography.  But we ran into a snag: the resolution of our photos isn't good enough for the layouts she was attempting.  So now I need to figure out how to resize the photos.  This means I need time to fool around with software without 5 or more people asking for things at the same time. Wish me luck.

A few pictures from the week:

  

We celebrated Katydid's birthday with carrot cake cupcakes from the farm store...

 

Watermelon seedlings are growing...

 

I've started paying kids $.01 a weed to pull zillions of weeds in the garden. (Actually, I think this would be a challenging problem: estimate the number of weeds in the garden. How much money could you make if you pulled all of them? Are Mommy and Daddy banking on the assumption that you'll lose interest before you get that far?)  Pip and Pop have been very interested in earning pennies, and will accept no dimes, nickels, or quarters. These are not weeds, by the way.  These are peas.

Burn Out and Re-Inspiration

As I was typing in the title of this post, it occurred to me that it meant something different than I thought it did when I came up with it.  I was thinking of "inspiration" in the standard sense: being "inspired" to do something, generally better than one might have done otherwise.  But as I typed the word, I was reminded that "inspiration" also means "to breathe".  And that's what I really want to write about.

Until a few days ago, my breathing was, literally, quite diminished.  I have never been officially diagnosed with asthma, although some years ago one of the kids' doctors told me I ought to have been.  I have a problem with certain molds that often grow in housing ventilation systems and old carpets.  I have a problem sometimes with hay fever and colds that combine to restrict my bronchial tubes.  When I was a kid, it was almost a given that I would spend half the winter (at least) with bronchitis.  Some of my earliest memories are of getting shots in the doctor's office.  Thankfully, I do not remember the ER visits in the middle of the night that my father has told me about.  I do remember the year I spent 6 months with walking pneumonia, though, the year my grandmother died.  I had to relearn what it was like to breathe that year, too. 

This month I didn't want to be sick.  I had too much to do.  So I put off acknowledging that I needed to go to the doctor, in the hopes that "it would just go away."  In other words, I was in complete denial.  Of course the wheezing did not just go away, and even when I finally went to the doctor and received the all-important inhaler, the wheezing did not go away entirely, and neither did the congestion in my head, in spite of the antibiotic.  So I did what mothers often do (again): I put off going back to the doctor.  In both cases, I had to feel like I was drowning before I went in.  And when I say, "I felt like I was drowning," I mean it literally.  This time the doctor perscribed me steroids, and now, a couple of days later, the difference is amazing.  I'm not completely 100%, but I can breathe again.

It's amazing what you can do when you feel like you aren't drowning.  When your lung capacity is suddenly cut by any sort of percentage, walking across the room can become a chore.  Talking may be out of the question.  Sometimes you lie awake in bed -- well, you don't lie exactly, you might have to sleep in a completely upright position -- and you listen to the cacaphony coming out of your lungs and you start thinking things like, "How would I know if it was time to get help?  Am I overreacting?  I can't be sick; I have so much to do!"

Then, when you finally receive medication that works -- when you finally STOP and admit that in fact, you are sick, and you do need help, and you cannot keep on doing everything you are trying (and failing) to do -- and you can finally BREATHE again, you can look back on yourself as you were and say, "What kind of crazy person WERE you anyway?  It's no wonder you couldn't do what you thought you needed to do! "

Sometimes life has to reach a critical mass before I realize what it is going on.  I try to keep on as if everything is "normal" when everything is anything but normal, until some tiny little event makes me understand how ridiculous things have gotten, and how ridiculous I am being about them.  For me, that one little event happened yesterday morning.  I received those precious steroids Wednesday night, but was going to leave them until Thursday morning to start so I wouldn't mess up the pill count.  But I woke up at 3 AM feeling like my throat was closing shut.  So I got up took all the medication I could handle -- steroid, Albuterol, nasal decongestant -- and then I couldn't go back to sleep for a while.  Thursday morning, I was feeling better than I had in a long time in spite of the little sleep that I'd gotten... and then Katydid walked into the family room in tears.

"My hamster is dead," she said.  "He died overnight.  He was just laying there, and I picked him up and he wasn't moving and he was cold.  Why is God doing these things?"

And that's when I knew that this summer had become ridiculous.  And that I had to take some kind of action.  We all needed to relearn how to breathe.

See, we started back in May when Katydid got strep, which we thought might be Lyme.  We were relieved when it wasn't Lyme, but then it gave her a headache that wouldn't go away.  For most of the summer there have been blood tests and MRIs and neurologist appointments and medications that don't work.  She got a pet rabbit that was killed by raccoons three weeks after we brought her home.  There was the pit bull in the yard who killed chickens on two different occasions (thankfully, "dangerous dog" proceedings were brought against the dog's owner last night.  I wrote a letter of evidence).  There was some mystery virus that passed through our ranks and hit Andy with such a vengeance that it mimiced a case of E.coli.  There was van trouble that reduced us to one vehicle for about a month.  There was soccer season and art classes that we couldn't attend because we couldn't get there and eye exams and a full travel schedule for Andy and all the food coming out of the garden, and me thinking that we needed to catch up on all the school that we'd missed back in May when we were running Katydid to another doctor every few days and laundry and laundry and more laundry, and a dining room that fills up again as soon as I clean it out.

I might have been the one wheezing, but it wasn't just me who needed to stop and just breathe for a while.

So that is what we are going to try to do.  I had a big pile of laundry that needed to be folded yesterday, but after wrestling with the twins all morning, and after Katydid and Farmerboy buried the hamster, I stopped and thought, "This is nuts.  We are going to meet Andy for lunch, and then we are going to the playground."

And that's what we did.  We met Andy for lunch (even though it was his first day back at work this week), and then we went to the playground.  Everyone had a great deal of fun.  This weekend we are going to the zoo in Syracuse.  After Labor Day, we are not resuming lessons as usual.  We are going to take a break.  We are going to attend a potluck with our homeschool group.  We are going to pick corn and beans.  We are going to head up to the Adirondacks and mess around up there for a few days.  We are going to clear out some of the detritus that has collected over this too-short, too-long summer.

But first, we are just going to stop and learn what it is like to have air in our lungs again.  We are going to inspire and re-inspire, and enjoy it.

A Mother's Job: Nuts and Bolts

Chipmunk has started nursing every two hours during the day again, and wants to be carried around in circles a great deal as well.  I haven't had much time to sit and type, but I have been able to read a few blogs while I stand around and bounce the baby.  As we (attempt to) prepare for Christmas -- and as a few logistical and behavioral problems make it abundantly clear that I need to overhaul our schedule -- I've found a couple of posts especially pertinent and thought I would share them with you.

The first is the Make Your Home a Haven Challenge, hosted at Biblical Womanhood.  Heather posted about it at 4Real and has been keeping track there, as well as on her blog.  I discovered this challenge a little late, but decided to join in anyway.  So far, the challenge has targeted the entryway, living room, and laundry room.  I came in late, but yesterday was sort of a catch-up day, and today's challenge involves doing something with and for your family, not cleaning, so I decided to jump in anyway.  Yesterday I worked on my entryway (and discovered that a $20 Wal-Mart bookcase is not meant to hold heavy reference books for long periods of time, but that's another story) and my laundry room.  All together, I probably spent 45 minutes on both rooms (not all at the same time) because that's all the time I had.  Because we have a LOT of clutter to deal with (and a lot of laundry, most of it clean, thankfully), I'll just keep working on those rooms little bit by little bit.  The small things DO count.

Angie also has a thought-provoking post on how she deals with exceptions to her routine.  There's a conversation about it over at 4Real, and Amy posted her thoughts yesterday.  Definitely something to think about. 

And finally (because I am over my time and need to get the kids going), Elizabeth wrote a post that sort of fits together with that post from Angie -- all about keeping things in perspective.

Violets on the Windowsill

A trip to Agway is always greeted with great joy around here. For one thing, we live in the boonies, and there just isn't that much to do close by. But where else can you find real live rabbits in hutches and chicks in pens, rhubarb roots and asparagus crowns in dusty bins, horse and hedgehog feed (really), taps for maple trees, toy tractors and animals, bright pink garden clogs, grow lights and lily bulbs, all in the same store?  On Saturday, there was a big display of flowering houseplants. Miniature roses, flashy magenta cyclamen, African violets... I picked up a rose and a violet for my kitchen window and brought them home to sit beside my wine bottle, the one labeled with a painting of Madonna and Child. It may not look much like spring outside yet, but the flowers inside remind me that it's coming.

In a couple of weeks, we will mark the end of our second year here in upstate New York. When we moved, I was 10 weeks pregnant with the twins. The day the moving truck showed up at our house in St. Louis, the kids were all in shorts and played outside, hard, in the dirt and our neighbor's sandbox, all day.  That night, after the movers left, we headed back over to our empty house before packing everyone in the car for a night at a hotel, and I don' think I have ever felt lonelier. There is something about a house in which you have borne and lost and raised babies, in which you have read books and dried tears and cooked countless meals, in which you have watched flowers bloom and die and bloom again, that makes it seem so much... less when everything is out of it and you are waving it good-bye, no matter how much you used to complain about the green carpet.

We made it to Indianapolis before Katydid realized she was leaving her friends forever and cried all the way to the Ohio border.  Whatever breaking my heart had left to do, it did it then.  But at that point our adventure was still fairly new and shiny.  A little tarnish was beginning to show around the edges, but we could handle a little tarnish.  This new job that Andy had taken promised to be far superior to his old job.  There would be no two hour commutes in rush hour traffic.  There would be better pay and more recognition, more satisfaction.  There would be far less bureacracy.  He would be far less stressed, and we would be able to buy land, and he could plant the orchard that he had wanted for years.

Now, I had grown in the country, and I thought I was being realistic in our move.  Yes, it would be harder to meet people.  Yes, it would require more driving.  Yes, I would actually have to cook dinner because there was such a limited number of restaurants in town.  Yes, there will be dirt and bugs.

Then we moved into our rental farmhouse.  This farmhouse was about a hundred years old, and it was enormous.  We had about 3/4 of it, which consisted of a living area, dining room, kitchen, two bathrooms plus a toilet in a closet in the master bedroom (one of the quirks of a 1960's remodel), and five bedrooms.  Our part of the house also included a deck and the run of the backyard, which was easily the best thing about the house, with its tiered stone wall gardens and the woods on the hill.  On paper (or over the Internet), the house had looked like a great deal.  It was huge, it had a big yard, and it was cheaper than renting an apartment farther away from Andy's job.  It was also located on a working dairy farm, which we thought would be a good learning experience for the kids.

But no amount of digital photography could convey the smell of this house.  It wasn't cow smell, because there were often times when I would have to open the windows or go outside, and the smell of cows and hay would be a relief to me.  No, this was a heady brew of mildew, forty-five year old carpet, and rotting wood, seasoned liberally with old pet urine and toxic floor wax.  The kitchen had been redone in the 60's, and it looked like that was the last time anyone had bothered to clean the grout in the tile countertop.  The kitchen was also half-carpeted, and that, it was easy to tell, had just been a bad idea. 

I was first trimester pregnant with twins.  I still think it was a miracle that I managed not to throw up when we first walked in the door.

The smell wasn't the only thing about that house, though.  The landlady had thoughtfully left me a big pile of dead flies on the floor in the master bedroom because "you'll have to get used to them!"  (And when I say a "big" pile, I mean there were hundreds of little fly corpses lying on the floor as if waiting for someone to light a funeral pyre.)  The farmer's son lived with his girlfriend next door and could often be heard shouting profanity at her (the same profanity he shouted at the cows, actually).  My sister told me she thought the house was cursed, because within weeks of moving in we'd made two emergency room visits for the kids.  We took Katydid to the ER on the first night we were there, with a kidney infection (the lab originally sent back erroneous results and she almost ended up having her appendix out), and Farmerboy got an ambulance ride a few weeks later, after he had a febrile seizure while eating a chocolate chip cookie.  One of the memories I wish I could erase from that time was of my little two year old lying on the floor of that ugly kitchen, his lips turning blue like the cabinets, and me frantically trying to follow the instructions Andy was shouting from 911.  (Thank God everything turned out all right!!)

This being upstate New York, when we moved here in April it was also cold, and not at all springlike.  The crocuses had just begun to bloom, while back "home" in Missouri my tulips had just burst into bloom.  One of the first things I did after moving was to pick up a few small, plastic pots of African violets for the kitchen windowsill.  With the violets in the window, it looked and felt a lot more like home, in spite of the smell.  And amid all the stress of selling and buying a house -- of disgruntled, disappointed, homesick, and physically ill children -- of a twin pregnancy -- I would sometimes simply have to stand at the window and look at the violets.

I kept them blooming far longer than I had ever kept a pot of violets blooming before.  (I tend to be a little forgetful about watering houseplants.  At least my outdoor gardens have rain!)  But during the move to our current house, they were somehow forgotten (along with my tomatoes) and although moved, turned brown and crunchy and died.  I was too busy then to think of them much; I did tend my tomatoes outside and was able to bring them back, and there were the wildflowers in our new field to watch, and about a million things to unpack, waxing TS to deal with before we knew Gareth had TS, enforced rest for me, and then -- babies, finally, healthy but born a month early.  Until I saw the violets at Agway this weekend, I was unaware of how much I missed their cheerful little faces. 

Spring here is not the same as it is other places.  I hear people talking about the new and welcome warmth, about planting seeds and ditching lessons to spend all day outside, of shedding coats and watching flowers bloom.  Our temperatures will likely remain in the 40's... and maybe the low 50's... for quite a while.  It could still snow.  It could snow in May.  We have to wait until the snow is off the garden and the soil dries out to plant anything -- although we are all itching to.  My crocuses are tiny green sprigs thrusting themselves valiantly up out of the cold, black mud.

This morning, I wanted to give up on the dailiness of my daily life.  My back has hurt for weeks, Gareth's TS is on the upswing (again), two of my children have strep, we are down to one car (again), the kids are either all fighting or ignoring me, the babies have constantly to be pulled down from high places... and more than that, I am tired.  I am tired of this cold wintry feeling in my soul which is the result not of the house being a wreck or wrestling with my son over math problems or my back ache or even the climate... but of the feelings of isolation which have never left any of us (except possibly my husband, whose job really is much better than the old one) since we moved.  My husband and I have essentially been on our own since we were 18.  We have always performed this balancing act far away from family, but it has been two years now, and friends are few and far between.

But God has sent us those friends when we most needed them.  The lavish shower Andy's office threw for me when I was pregnant with the babies -- my first real shower ever! -- the Catholic homeschooling mom who mailed me back after I tossed out a desperate e-mail (yet another one) to a local homeschooling list, which led to the kids actually making some friends after we'd been here a year (it helped so much) -- the new online friends I've made in the past year (bless them), those tiny little green leaves shoving themselves out of the dirt this morning, when I had to go outside and take a deep breath (a few of them) to face everything on the inside again.

Life may not be a bed of roses, but at least there is a pot of violets on my windowsill.

Never Take You For Granted

Ten years ago today, I went into labor for the very first time.  I was 24 years old, living in a big city with no family and no friends -- just me and my husband.  At this time of night (about 10:15 PM), I'd been in labor for about 6 hours and it had become apparent that when the nurse said, "They're going to be doing some work on the building tonight," what she meant was, "They're going to shut off all the water to our wing tonight, and you won't be able to flush the toilet, and we'll run out of water for ice chips, and, oh, by the way, did the Orioles win?"  The doctor on the first shift made fun of me for trying different labor positions.  The doctor on the second shift had been on for about five minutes when, in the midst of debating whether or not to prep me for an emergency C-section, Gareth's heart rate plunged.  Then there was no time for a C-section; they pulled him out with vacuum suction when I was still only 8 cm dilated.  Immediately the room filled up with nurses, residents, other doctors, prepared to rush a fragile, blue baby to the NICU.

His first newborn wails were the sweetest sounds I had ever heard.  He wasn't blue at all.  He was a healthy wriggling little pink baby boy, and when they put him into my arms for the first time, and I looked down into his wide gray eyes -- gazing up at the ceiling tiles and the bright lights in wonder -- I promised him, I will never take you for granted.

Giving birth has always been a frightening experience for me, and not just because it involves pain.  My mother -- my biological mother -- died giving birth to me.  I have heard that she was conscious for about twenty minutes after I was born.  I have often wondered, was she even able to hold me?  Was she able to count my fingers and toes, and look down into my gray newborn eyes looking up at her?  Did I ever see her face?

My mother died of an amniotic embollism.  A bubble of amniotic fluid somehow entered her blood stream.  It entered her lungs and killed her.  The odds of amniotic embollism in childbirth are extremely low.  No hereditary conditions cause amniotic embollism.  It is a freak accident. 

When I was pregnant with Gareth, I looked up all this information in a medical textbook.  The book I read listed the odds of dying in childbirth in 1972, the year I was born.  Was it 1 in 13 million, or 13 in 1 million?  I'm not sure now.  I remember reading the numbers and closing the book.  I remember folding my arms over the book and resting my forehead on them, and looking down into the small dark place I had created, and breathing in the musty scent of the book's cover and the university library, all the other books with meaningless numbers in them.  I remember the hum of the air conditioner.

The first three months of my pregnancy with Gareth were a lot like that small dark place.  I don't remember much about them, except that the smell of bread made me sick, and that I took a walk one cold, wet May day to think about things, and I spent many hours on the couch reading fantasy novels.  I wondered if I would die, too, but I didn't want to think about it, so I didn't think about anything. 

Not thinking about anything was actually an improvement in my life at the time.  The month before I discovered I was pregnant with Gareth I had almost lost a years-long struggle with depression.  When I say "almost lost" I mean I was thinking about suicide.  And I thought about it a lot.  I didn't know why my mother should have been the one to die, and I should have been the one to live, when I was obviously (so I thought) unsuited to life in this world.  I hated my job as a technical writer.  I had dropped out of my graduate program in anthropology among a kerfluffle of disapproval.  My parents (my father remarried when I was 4) had always urged me to be practical, but I wasn't.  I wasn't practical in any way, shape, or form.  Seventeen years of institutional schooling had convinced me that I was weird and wrong and bored me to tears.  I'd been labeled "gifted", but what did that really mean?  Not much.  Anything I was good at or wanted to learn seemed to be the wrong thing.  By the time I was 24 I felt like a polar bear at the zoo --pacing back and forth, back and forth neurotically, unadapted to the climate, frustrated at the boundaries it was forced to live in, but unable to get out.   I wanted to write stories.  And I wanted to have babies.  I didn't want to wait.  I didn't want to "just accept that you will live with guilt", the way one therapist told me.  Or "that you might have to keep that job for five years or so," as another said, instead of something that might really  have helped me, such as:

It's good that you want to have a family, because that's what marriage is for.  Quit your job, have babies, stay home with them,  and enjoy them.  Eat ramen noodles.  Make due with one car.  Babies are so much more important.  You can write your stories while they nap.

Nobody told me this, but it's what I did anyway.  At the time, my husband and I knew nothing about Catholic teachings regarding children and marriage.  We decided, one cold January, that we were ready to have children.  Then we decided that we were not.  But it didn't matter at that point.  Because God knew what we needed, and he sent him to us in a little gray-eyed bundle.

As I lay in bed in the delivery room and watched the clock hands tick away the minutes after Gareth was born -- five, ten, fifteen, twenty -- I finally began to relax a little.  I finally began to think that I was not going to die, that I was going to have all the chances that my mother never had: the chance for chubby baby fingers to close around my own, the chance to inhale that newborn baby scent when I pressed him up close to my face -- the chance to watch as he crawled and walked and ran and read and turned ten years old, and his feet bigger than mine already. 

A nurse once marveled that I would even consider having children "with my history".  But what kind of life do you lead if you let fear control it?

Some day, when he's older, maybe I'll tell Gareth the whole story.  For now I try hard to live that promise I made to him when he was only minutes old:

I will never take you for granted.

Happy Birthday, Buddy.