Light and Momentary

Too Many Fish in the Sea

Our little homeschooling group was planning to make a banner.  The parish school kids were walking in solemn procession to mark the Year of the Eucharist and we were going to join them.  I was worried about this, since my Joe doesn't do solemn and I pretty much hate felt banners.  But I was game.

 

***

The moms meet to plan the banner.  "I know!" I say.  "A pelican! With chicks!"

Blank stares all around, as if I had said, "I know! Yogi Bear! With cubs!"

I explain.  And then I imagine pelican chicks, not the most attractive representatives of their genus to begin with, rendered in felt.  By small children.  Perhaps Yogi Bear was a better idea.  Is he a Eucharistic symbol?

Plan B: a beach scene.  A pelican on the beach, unobtrusively symbolizing the Eucharist with no creepy-looking naked chicks nearby.  Four figures in silhouette (Jesus, Peter, James, John).  Each kid makes a fish and glues it onto the water.  The moms glue an onion bag atop the fish for a net.  Matthew 4:19 will go somewhere in puffy paint.  This can work, we say.

I go home and tell the boys.  The oldest says, "I'm not making any dumb fish.  Unless I can make a giant squid.  How about that?"

I think for a minute.  Is this creativity?  Is this a reasonable reaction to an activity I would have hated as a kid?  Or is this pain-in-the-butt-ness that ought to be squelched?  I am torn.  My husband is not.

"You can't make a squid if you're supposed to make a fish," he says with finality.  "That's not even the right phylum."

"Okay, then," says Alex. "How about an alien sea fungus?"

Elwood rolls his eyes.  "That's not even the right kingdom!"

We talk taxonomy for a few minutes.  Where do sharks and bony fish diverge -- class? order?  Alex allows as to how he might be willing to make a sawfish.  It can only be three inches long, I warn him, imagining him painstakingly cutting out each tiny projection until he crumples the whole thing in frustration.  This is a dumb idea, he says again.

The next day we go to the craft store to buy puffy paint.  He wants to know why, if rocks and trees can praise the Lord, giant squid are excluded.  "Giant squid can praise the Lord, honey," I said, thinking to myself that this is a sentence I never expected to utter.  "We're making fin fish, though."  We talk about the ICHTHYS acronym, and about being made in the image of God.  I consider a Divine Cephalopod.  Hmph, says my firstborn.

At home he tries again.  If God made squid, he declared them good, right?  They were considered clean, right?  (This is what you get when you read your kid Leviticus in kindergarten.)  No! I say, running for the computer.  I don't think so.  Sure enough, fish have to have fins and scales to be kosher.

"But!" he says, his face lighting up, "That doesn't matter to us because of the New Covenant!  Of course I can be a giant squid!"

We end up missing the banner-making get-together because no one else wants to share the mucus.  The solemn procession proceeds sans Gladly-fish because our car is in the shop and I don't want to walk all the way in the cold with a sick baby.  But Alex isn't done thinking about giant squid. 

Tonight at dinner he says, "I bet the fishermen in the Sea of Galilee caught squid in their nets, didn't they?  Fisherman is technically a dimunitive term."

I don't know what "dimunitive" is supposed to mean but he says it with such earnestness that I have to nod my head thoughtfully in response.  I think he's heading for law school.  I may be heading for a facility with padded walls.  At least I'll be laughing most of the way there.

In Which I Complain

Be advised, ladies:  you are either going to find this the most boring post I've ever written or you will cry out in full voice YES, JAMIE, YES! so that your husband will poke his head into the room to see who this Jamie is and what he or she is doing to you.  This is a post about switching clothes.

Did you shudder?  If not, you may want to go watch paint dry now.

Switching clothes is the rite of spring (and also fall -- if Stravinsky had been a mother he would have written a piece explicitly about switching clothes) in which summer (or winter) clothes are washed, sorted, bagged, and shelved, and fall (or spring) clothes take their places in the drawers.

That sounds fairly straightforward, doesn't it?  That doesn't sound like a job that should take me all day and make me think thoughts of hot forks and displeasure, does it?  And yet here I sit, saying, Bring on the forks, baby.

I have learned something today -- relearned, I should say, as I have known this fact since I was younger than three of my children are now -- and it is this:  4>3. 

What am I talking about?  I'm talking about how going from zero children to one child was an enormous adjustment and going from one child to two children was an enormous adjustment but going from two to three wasn't so bad and going from three to four has been really pretty easy except that I'm always behind on email (apologies to all and sundry whom I owe email but especially Sarah who wrote me with homeschooling questions guilt guilt guilt).  But there are these moments when I think, Oh, yeah, four children is kind of a lot -- like the first time I did laundry after Pete was born, when I was so tired and hormonal that the thought of getting one more pile of folded clothing into a dresser drawer made me want to go lie down with a margarita (except that lying down with a margarita would have created additional laundry).  And today:  today I'm telling you that four children is a larger than average family.  In case you were wondering.

I have been kvetching about sorting clothes for a long time, as any of my IRL friends can attest, and not everyone gets it.  (Especially my friends with one boy and one girl, who are not handing many clothes down from one sibling to the next.)  What's the big deal? they say, and I don't have a fabulous explanation.  It's just so grindingly dull and it's hard to do it right.  Am I going to mend this shirt that a child bit a hole in or just pretend I don't notice it?  I've never liked this polyester shirt with an excavator on it -- should it go in the thrift shop bag or should I save it for the boy who loves machines?  (I am so tired that I just tried three times to spell "thrift" as "thfirt," which strikes me as a much cooler word.)  The pieces of this outfit are actually two different sizes -- do I keep them together because they go together or do I put them in different bags?

(I warned you!  Don't say I didn't warn you if your jaw is slackening and your snoring is waking the neighbors!  Go watch some cheese melt and come back later, when perhaps there will be a brownie recipe if I am not too muddled with sorting-induced stupefaction to type it up.)

Oh! tags!  How could I forget about the tags?  Did you know that if the Egyptians had scoffed at the Angel of Death the Lord would have sent a plague of tags upon them?  Take it from my boys:  tags are the source and summit of all evil, the scourge of nations.  They must be cut out!  Out!  Let no pestilential pruritus plague this place!

...and then, when those shorts need to be sorted and bagged and shelved I say to myself UGH! WHAT SIZE ARE THESE STUPID TAGLESS SHORTS ANYWAY?!

I sound like such a spoiled American, I know.  This is a lament of luxury, a consumer's cri du coeur.  I have been blessed immeasurably with four healthy children, and blessed again with enough material goods that organizing them is a chore, and I am complaining like I've been hit with a plague of locusts.

(Speaking of which: I have a cricket problem in my basement.  They seem to like my dryer.  Today I found a baked cricket in my clean laundry.  This did not improve my mood.)

I have the system down these days.  I use plastic grocery bags for storage, since they are a good size and in ready supply.  They need to be labeled (e.g, "2T summer") with a big fat permanent marker so there is no doubt about the contents of the bag.  Once my husband volunteered to help and he put unlabeled bags in random places on the storage shelves.  I'll take a baked cricket over unlabeled bags in random places.  The bags go from left to right, newborn to big kid, on a high basement shelf.  I used to wash the clothes before I put them in drawers, but these days I only do that for the baby.  If any spiders have made their way into the bags and thence into the dressers -- well, spiders are our friends, boys.  Ask Wilbur.

Today I asked my oldest son to go through his dresser and take out everything summery or too small.  He put together a tidy pile of tank tops and shorts, but I was discouraged when I made another sweep of his drawers.  Top drawer:  a dozen pairs of toddler-sized socks (why?).  Second drawer:  a pair of soiled underwear mixed in with his pajamas.  Bottom drawer:  four of his brother's shirts.  Maybe next spring he can help.

I'm not going to think about next spring right now, though.  I'm also not going to post the (very delicious) brownie recipe tonight, because bed is calling me.  (If I washed all the bedding for three beds today, how many of them will be wet by morning?)  The last thing I have to say before I collapse in a heap:  4>3.  Some days, 4>>3.

P.S. Wait, actually, I have one more thing to say and it is that my husband took the three big boys for HOURS today so I could sort clothes.  Otherwise, they would have been wearing shorts all winter long.  Hate sorting clothes.  Love that man.