Light and Momentary

Accomplish My Going Forth

Today -- o frabjous day, callooh callay -- I finished a draft of the last chapter of my dissertation.

In my field a dissertation is usually four chapters. In the first, you explain why this is an interesting question and what other people have said about it. In the second, you spell out what you're going to do. I wrote the first two chapters in the fall of '08 in preparation for my prelim, and then rewrote chapter 2 last summer and fall to reflect what I actually did. Chapter 3 describes your results -- that's the 40-page monster I sent off earlier this week. Chapter 4 is discussion -- what it all means, how it fits into existing research, what questions you've raised for other researchers to consider.

I've been working on chapter 4 in small bites for a while. After all the coding and analyzing it's been really fun to be opinionated. Sometimes I would just open the document and throw in a quick note to myself: this measure of vocabulary diversity = BAD. Later I would go back and put it into researcher-ese.

My mother-in-law came down yesterday and stayed overnight, and I've been writing up a storm while she watches the kids -- fixing the earlier bits and tying them together, and writing writing writing all the pieces that still needed to be written. I just finished. The last word is "hope." :-)

Way back when I was in the second semester of this program, Arwen left me a comment about asking for the intercession of St. Thomas Aquinas and Our Lady Seat of Wisdom. I thought, "Hey, what a great pair of intercessors." I have asked for their prayers every day since then. It seems perfectly right for me to finish this draft on the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas.

I need to review this draft before I send it off to my advisor, and I will have plenty of revisions to do in the next 3.5 weeks before the document is ready to go to my committee. But you know, once it's written down, you've got something to work with.

I am going to hug my kids, and see if they're willing to go to Mass with me this evening. I am so relieved. Tired, too, but mostly relieved.

The View from Here

1. Finally, after months of wrangling with thousands of data points, I have a completed draft of my results chapter. I just wrote the last paragraph. That, my friends, was a big job. (It's not over, of course. I have typed and deleted six different versions of this sentence, torn between celebrating the accomplishment and acknowledging that plenty of revising lies ahead.)
2. After, like, six years of unremitting grayness (all right, maybe it's only been 10 days), the sun is peeking out.
3. I am bundling up the baby and taking her out to enjoy the sunshine with me before we pick up the boys.

Rubber, This Is Road; Road, Rubber

Last February I spoke at a retreat about especially helpful things I'd learned over the previous ten years. Part of the talk was about striving to give generously to God -- to tithe, to offer back Sundays as a day of rest and worship, to be generous in the service of life.

[Interruption: I feel a burning need to clarify the tone here. It was not about me sailing from victory to victory, with nary a doubt or a moment's foot-dragging. It was me saying, "I don't want to; I'm scared to; I can't," followed by God saying, "How about if you try it first?" It was years of God saying, "Trust me, Jamie, with your money and your time and your body," and me saying, "Careful! Are you being very careful there? I'm not sure you're being careful enough!" Afterward I found myself saying, "...Who'd'a' thunk it? I feel...rested? and provided for? and blessed? Who knew?" This was about Jamie as Slow Learner, not Jamie as any kind of Uber-Disciple.]

--anyway, I told them earnestly, "No one ever says, 'Look at that, I have an extra day in my week and an extra 10% in my budget! I think I'll rest on Sundays and tithe!'" I believe that the decision comes first and then the pieces can fall into place around it. It is a truism that you cannot out-give God, but I was still astonished to see the fruits of those choices.

Right at this moment, though, I am feeling the pinch. I told my advisor that I would have a complete draft of my dissertation to her by Friday. Whoa, I just got a little woozy typing that. Friday. The prospect of taking off to a coffee shop tomorrow afternoon and working away in the quiet is very tempting. Is it necessary work? Probably not. Will I feel better on Monday if I take tomorrow off? I am certain I will.

My littlest blessing is snoring in my lap right now. If I could have picked the week when she would get so sick, it sure wouldn't have been this one. But you know, if I could have picked the year when she would arrive in our family, it wouldn't have been 2008. Now I am so glad she came along when she did. So I am trying to roll with it, and give her and my dissertation what they need at the same time. (Elwood took that picture after I'd been kneeling in front of the couch crunching numbers one-handed for ... I don't know, 20 minutes? The baby didn't want to be put down even after she fell asleep, and I was determined to finish a particular section of chapter 3 before nightfall. She complained when I sat down, so I knelt instead. Please ignore the festive stripes of ibuprofen and amoxicillin on my shirt where she spewed them in protest.)

It's also pinch season financially -- I got behind on giving during the last quarter of '09, and caught up in the last week of the year. Those credit card bills are coming due and I am juggling figures in my head, trying to keep us on track. Everything taken together, right at this moment, makes me want to say "Generous schmenerous!"

This post is me taking myself by the shoulders and saying, "Let's not go back to remedial class. We know better than that." I believe God is faithful through lean seasons and sicknesses and weeks when I just don't know how it's all going to get done. So. The decision is made and I'm going to trust that the pieces will fall into place. (But if I'm scarce this week, you'll know what I'm up to.)

Mothering FAIL

I knew the baby had a fever. I thought it was ~100, maybe 101. I thought all day about taking her to the doctor. She wasn't acting like she was in pain; she was nursing and wetting diapers -- not as much as usual, but I wasn't worried that she was dehydrated. I was pretty sure the doctor would just tell me she needed rest and fluids and TLC.

She woke up while we were eating dinner and I brought her downstairs. Her head and trunk felt feverish, but her hands and feet were cold. She was breathing too fast. She wasn't interested in anybody or anything at the table. And all day she's had this look-- I've been thinking of it as the "defeated" look.

I scooped her up and went to the evening clinic. The assistant who took her vitals announced that she had an axillary temp of 103 (!!! -- how could I have missed that??). She wrote down Stella's pulse and respiratory rate (both too high) and said, "I'm getting the nurse right away." FAIL FAIL FAIL.

Turns out she has a bilateral ear infection. Pulse ox was fine (thank the Lord), but they said, "If she gets any worse, or if she doesn't perk up after a couple of doses of antibiotics, don't hesitate to take her to the ER."

Poor little muffin.

PS She thinks amoxicillin is from the pit of hell.

Pleasant Surprises

1. My best friend from junior high just found me on Facebook. We lost touch after her parents divorced and she moved to the Midwest.
2. Talked to my advisor about chapter 3 by phone this morning, and her preliminary feedback was much more encouraging than I expected. We'll meet in person tomorrow and I may be singing a different tune afterward, but she provided me with motivation for today. Thank the Lord, I will not have to resolve the question of the potential misclassification before my defense. Such a relief.
3. I couldn't put my hands on my car keys this morning, so Pete and I started to walk to preschool. I didn't realize that the streets and sidewalks were thinly glazed with ice. It was so treacherous that I thought about turning back and calling a cab. A neighbor spotted us and offered us a ride -- much appreciated.
4. I am about 60% of the way there on figuring out my moderating variables, and I have a Plan for tackling the remaining 40%. It no longer feels like I'm trying to decipher the Rosetta Stone, more like I'm working on a medium-sized pain in the butt which I can handle even if I'd rather be reading something fluffy or perhaps taking a nap.

Boy, I am grateful for some nice surprises today. I have been feeling ground down by the dissertation. Stella is sick and very needy -- that distinctively toddler kind of neediness (Pick me uuuuup! Walk with meeeee! Wooooooe is me! Nurse meeeeee! Stooooop nursing me! Whyyyyy are you BREATHING on me, Mom?) I'm glad she feels better with me holding her. I am also looking forward to her recovery.

Now if I can find the Secret Hiding Place where she stashed my cell phone, it will be a banner day.

One thing is missing...

I have a date for my defense. The form requesting that my committee be approved has been signed by the department head and forwarded to the college. I just got the secretary's note confirming that she'd reserved a room in which I can present my findings to my committee. (And anyone else who wants to come. It's open to the public, so hey, if you're in town...)

All I need is a dissertation. It is bending my brain around right now. I had a slightly freaked-out phone conversation with my advisor today when I discovered that one of my sibling pairs might have been misclassified. I said, "I'm feeling a little behind. Are you worried?"

She said, "No, I'm not worried." She said, "I am sure that between the two of us we can bang this out."

I hope she's right.

Kindly Light

The more I learn, the less I know.

Earlier in the program I was much more confident. Maybe I didn't know something, but I was going to figure it out. All through the dissertation stage I have been plagued with doubt. Last January: I'm not going to able to figure out the morpheme coding. (Remember my friend Vlad?) In March: I'm not going to be able to come up with a reasonable strategy for measuring low-frequency vocabulary. In May: I'm never going to finish this syntax analysis. In July: I'm not going to be able to understand the multilevel modeling book. In September: I can't use R to analyze my results because it's too hard.

Only some of this is pessimism. It has been a hard slog, requiring me to use many new tools. All along the way there have been flashes of insight, moments of inspiration, offers of unexpected assistance. 

One of the things I love about this prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas is its recognition that God who is omniscient as well as all-holy calls us out of both ignorance and sin -- that we can honor God through learning about the world he has made. I was thinking about this in the small hours of this morning, pacing with a wakeful baby and pondering, mercifully, not my sleep deprivation but the wonder of creation. The heavens are telling the glory of God, from galaxies to gluons. (The psalmist, of course, didn't mention this one, but I kept thinking, "ATP. ATP is evidence for the existence of God." It seems less convincing now than it did at 2am.)

I told my advisor that I was going to try to finish my model-building this week, which is going to require a lot of work. I need answers to some hard questions (e.g., what is going on with that funky U-shaped relationship between two of my moderating variables?). It would be easy for me to feel overwhelmed.

But do you know, I wrote this post yesterday, and saved it in my drafts folder so I could add the links. Already I am feeling like I have reasonable answers to a couple of the questions that were vexing me. I do not expect that all of my work this week will go as smoothly, but I am encouraged.

Lead, kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom, lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

A Tip From Me To You

Oh, I had such a productive dissertation day today. SO productive. I told my husband that I would hit my goals for the week today rather than Saturday. Pete asked to stay for the afternoon session at preschool. The baby had an unbelievable nap. I worked like a woman obsessed.

I left my stats program up and running because I had about ten minutes' worth of work to finish. [<-foreshadowing]

Alas, alas alas, when I came back to the computer it had shut down. All my pretty new dataframes are gone. I had written the results up in a Word document which did not get eaten by marauding data monsters, but I also need the stuff that was living inside my stats program.

It will not take me nearly as long to do it a second time. Some of the work I did this afternoon was brain work (deciding what to do and learning how to do it) and some of it was finger work (typing in the right commands to get it done). The redo will be almost entirely finger work. But still: ARGH.

Save your work, my friends; the data monsters are lurking out there.

Hastily

1. I have the simple models fitted and their descriptions drafted, and now I am edging my way into more complex model-fitting. I think I can I think I can.
2. Crescent Dragonwagon's gumbo is one of my favorite things to cook and eat. I thought about asking her permission to post the recipe but it is too long for me to type it up. It's in both the Soup & Bread cookbook and Passionate Vegetarian -- check it out. It is a Project, but I am going to be eating delicious veggies for many meals. Passionate Vegetarian halved the recipe from Soup & Bread, but it's not all that much more work to make twice the soup. In for a penny, in for a pound.
3. I think I can only manage about a resolution and a half per day. Today was great on the sugar/veggie front, and not so good on the FlyLady front. Although-- today was also really good on the dissertation front, and there are only so many 15-minute stretches in one day.
4. The boy most likely to be gloomy said something I want to remember today. I went out in the evening to work and Stella was glad to see me when I came home. She wanted me to pick her UP and then sit DOWN and take my coat OFF (the prepositions stand in for emphatic baby grunts and gestures) -- and then she wanted to NURSE already. Her brother said, "It's nice to watch her with you. [hold on, I have to get the paper where I wrote it down, so I could remember exactly what he said...] It reminds me that there is happiness and security in the world and it's right in front of me." Melt! Melt melt melt!
5. My sink is very unshiny and I am off to do something about that.

Lost and Found Still Lost and Lost Some More Dagnabbit

In our downstairs bathroom we have a laundry chute. At least it used to be a laundry chute. Now I think it is a wormhole, a door through which our belongings are traveling to another dimension.

You might think that would be a cool thing to have in your house, but I disagree. I REALLY REALLY disagree. I want my stuff back.

I go through phases in my life where I lose things. Does anybody remember when I lost that check? That was January too. Maybe it's a January thing. Maybe I shouldn't pay so much attention to my New Year's resolutions because clearly they distract me from important tasks like not letting stuff get sucked into eddies in the space-time continuum. (The resolutions are not the problem. I am not doing so well with the resolutions today. In fact, I am Faily F. McFailerson on the sugar front. Sigh.)

I am missing a bunch of stuff right now. A pair of hand-knit socks. The copy of my prospectus document in which one of my committee members wrote all of her comments about things I need to change before the defense. A baby shoe. It was two baby shoes, one each from two pairs, but I found one. Praise the Lord and pass the sanity.

Here's where the wormhole idea comes in: I am also missing a pair of little red leggings that go under one of Stella's cutest dresses. The dress went down the laundry chute, but the leggings? Dimension X, man. They are nowhere to be found. This morning I pulled out a pair of jeans for Pete that hadn't quite dried. He refused to wear them and tossed them down the laundry chute. No, wait -- he tossed them into the laundry chute, whence they vanished.

I took a broom handle and poked around in there to make sure it wasn't clogged. Pretty brave, huh? I could have been sucked into Dimension X, but I faced down the vortex and lived to tell the tale.

I remember writing a blog post about losing things and do you know what? I can't find that either, not even with the mighty arm of Google. (I suppose it's actually the mighty grep of Google.) Where could it be? It was about buying new DPNs and having them disappear, never to be seen again.

This is getting kind of meta -- I've lost my record of my lost things. Anyway, I blame the laundry chute.

Come out, come out, whoever you are

I have it on good authority that this is International Delurking Day. So delurk! Or say hi even if you're not a lurker. I love it when people say hi.

Game On

All right. The Christmas decorations are down; the Three Kings Day presents are opened. I am posting my New Year's resolutions because then I will stick to them, right? Right?

1. Strive to pray the whole rosary every day. I don't know how often I will get all 20 decades in, but a mom's reach should exceed her grasp &c. I will be happy if I hit double digits every day and finish it 2-3 times a week or so. It took me a long time to love the rosary but it is such a lovely way to pray.
2. Aim to do everything FlyLady tells me every day. We'll have to see about this one. FlyLady tells me to do a lot of things in a day. 
3. GIVE UP SUGAR and start another Vegetable Project (every day eat 5 servings of vegetables and drink a gallon of cold water; don't eat sugar but don't have a cow about anything else). Remember when I was going to lose 10 pounds? I lost 7 of them and then the fall semester hit me like a Mack truck. (ETA: I gained it all back, every ounce.) This plan I am going to stick to until my defense, which is 9 weeks from today. I reserve the right to eat ice cream after my defense. I also reserve the right to ask the counter person to say, "Here's your ice cream, Dr. Jamie."

I am making progress on my dissertation, people. I have many many hours' worth of work to do in the next seven weeks (that's when I need to get my document to my committee, so they can read and critique before the defense), but by golly I'm getting there.

A Little Girl

Maybe this won't be surprising to anybody else. Maybe it's just that I had four boys first. But Stella loves her babies. We have three dolls in this house and she carries them around and around, one in each fist, until she gets to the one she dropped last. She switches babies and toddles off.

The doll stroller had been living in the basement because there are four boys in this house. The boys do not think strollers are for pretend outings with the babies. Strollers are projectiles. Strollers are weapons. Strollers might be armor if your brother takes it into his head to use something as a weapon (the shoe basket, say) and you're in his line of fire. Strollers are for pushing ahead of you at top speed as you race around the downstairs shouting, "Faster! Hurry up before Mom finds out we're racing in the house!"

If you ever wonder why I don't post more often, it's because I'm busy putting the kibosh on stroller races and stroller battles or perhaps relegating the stroller to the basement again.

Yesterday I brought it up from the basement and showed Stella how her baby could ride in it. Oh, so much fun. She pushed one baby and she chirped at one baby and she had a grand time. And then! She had a brilliant idea!

See the upside-down dolly in the picture? That's where she said, Look, it's a double stroller, Mom! Also, they need a book to read because sometimes it's boring to ride in the stroller.

I have had girly toys in this house off and on for years, and this was the first time anyone ever thought that two babies might like to go for a ride together.

This is going to be fun.

Want to read all of Charles Dickens' novels?

Full disclosure: I am not exactly qualified to write this post. I have one novel to go*. But here's how this post came about: at the end of 1999 I was thinking things over. Y2K was rapidly approaching, and I was going to turn 30 that year. We'd only had an internet connection in our home since the spring, but already I was aware of its time-sucking focus-splintering dark side. I remember looking out across the next decade and thinking about who I wanted to be at the end of it, and about what kind of steward I hoped to be of the gifts God had given me. Also, we had no shower in our little rental Edinburgh house, and I had discovered that a person could get a fair amount of reading done in that quiet half-hour in the bath at night.

I decided that every year I would read a Dickens novel and a Shakespeare play. I figured I'd get them read by menopause. It turns out that I'll finish all of the Dickens novels* before I turn 40. It's been really fun. Here are three tips if you are interested in a Dickens project of your own.

What She's Missing

We made a speedy trip to see my family over New Year’s, and this morning the whole gang of us had brunch. I asked my sister-in-law about a good friend of hers whose baby died earlier in 2009.

It was a brief conversation but it brought tears to my eyes a couple of times. The thing that killed me was when she told me they’d hung a stocking for the baby. Aaggh, it still brings tears to my eyes. Can you imagine? Empty arms, quiet house, and a stocking for the baby who never heard her mother call her name.

I’ve only met my SIL’s friend a couple of times, and it surprised me that I was teary-eyed during our conversation. I was thinking about it afterward, wondering why. Here’s what I think: I think that one of the gifts of motherhood is the recognition of the treasure we’ve been given. Do you know what I mean? The treasure itself is one gift; seeing its real value is still another.

Sometimes I worry that the big picture doesn’t come through for my kids. I’m afraid I get so busy saying “blow your nose hang your clothes wipe your feet brush your teeth quiet quiet quiet will you LISTEN already?” –- so busy that they think the hygiene or the manners or the chores are my top priority when really, my top priority is to teach them about love. I want to love them the best I can, and to teach them to think, in every situation, “What is the loving thing to do here?” I want them to know down in their bones that the greatest of these is love -– love and not snot management. (Although I have to ask -– does anyone else find that it takes boys a long time to figure out how to deal with snot?)

It’s a cliché that you don’t know how much you’ll love your children until you become a mother but you know, things get to be clichés because they’re true. I think I am sad for this woman because I know what she’s missing. I know that the fringe of 4-year-old eyelashes, closed in sleep, is about the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen. I know the delight of laughing out loud at a perfectly timed joke from my 13yo, and the pleasant puzzlement I feel when one of my middle boys stumps me with a question I can’t even begin to answer. I know the visceral pleasure of smelling my baby’s sweet milky breath.

That might be the most intimate smell I know: the smell of my blood, fashioned into my milk, offered to my baby, assimilated into her body, breathed back into me. It is like my baby speaking to me, saying, “I was once a part of you, and now you are a part of me.”  The closeness of pregnancy is not the closeness of infancy which is not the closeness of adolescence. But on this solemnity of the Mother of God, I am asking her to pray for my children and me, that we might stay close all along the way. I am wondering what it must have been like to breathe in God’s very breath, and asking her to pray, too, that we might love her Son as dearly as she did.

I am also praying for my SIL’s friend, who has a new baby on the way but who is not finished grieving the one she lost less than a year ago. Will you say a prayer for her too?

We crossed the Ohio River this afternoon and Joe said, “That big bridge makes me nervous. What if it breaks while we’re driving across it and we fall into the water?” I said, “Oh, honey, there’s no need to be nervous. It’s a strong bridge. Besides, God is sovereign over everything, and there are much worse fates than going to heaven together with your whole family.” He said, “You’re right! I hope it does crash! I want to go to heaven with my whole family.”

I can certainly think of ways I'd rather go. Even so, the sentiment makes me want to say, Me too, sweetie. Me too.