Light and Momentary

Cue the Twilight Zone music

If you've been around for a while, you might remember how we named our daughter in honor of my grandmother. She has been slow to talk (cobblers' wives go barefoot &c.), and she has never called herself anything until tonight.

"Tell mama your name," I said tonight.

"Nell-nell," she told me.

I did a double take. "Say it again," I said, wondering if it was a flukey one-time thing."Tell mama your name."

"Nell-nell," she said again.

My daugher has never met anybody named Nell and has never been called Nell. It's not an obvious abbreviation of her actual name, though it does make some sense. Out of all the things she could have called herself, she picked my grandmother's lifelong nickname.

Sunday Night Strategizing

Hey, I have an idea. I think I am going to post some goals for the week on Sunday nights. I have written frequently about how motivating I find it to get my to-do list out of my head and onto the web, and so I think I'll make it a regular thing. Want to join me? I am using Holly Pierlot's Ps to guide my list-making, but do your own thing.

Here's my plan:

1. Finish the St. Therese novena and get ready for the enthronement of the Sacred Heart (about which more soon).
2. Make that doctor's appointment to discuss my unruly heart.
3. Finish those socks and schedule parent-teacher conferences x 4.
4. Article draft to co-author for review by Wednesday; finish chapter 5 in multivariate stats book.

To the tune of "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall"

Fifty more rounds of twisted rib,
fifty more rounds, my friends,
Then "tbl"
can go to hell
Fifty more rounds of twisted rib...

Back in the spring I told my kids I'd knit them each a pair of socks -- any pattern, any yarn. Two of them picked patterns by Cookie A., a designer of beautiful socks who is stuck on twisted rib.

Twisted rib, for the non-knitters among you, is what you get when you knit through the back loop, or "tbl." It looks snappy. It takes me forever. FOREVER.

After hassles galore and a summer in which I didn't knit very much, I can finally see some light at the end of the Sock Odyssey tunnel. Assuming I do not give myself a repetitive strain injury (which may be a bold assumption, because my right hand is feeling positively arthritic after a week in get-'er-done mode), I will be finished with twisted rib on Tuesday.

And then? No more twisted rib for, like, a year. When I post the pictures later this week, it will be your cue to say, "Oooh! aaahhh! look at that snappy ribbing!"

Dear Principal

I try to read every piece of paper you send home, really I do. It's a whole lot of pieces of paper, and I have to say I get a little vexed when you tell my kid to ask me for names and addresses of extended family members whom you can ask to buy ugly costume jewelry, but I try to keep up.

So where was the announcement about today's early dismissal? Where exactly? The clue phone is ringing: schedule weirdness is a big pain for employed parents, especially parents employed out of town.

Yours  grumpily,
Jamie of the unexpectedly shortened workday (who supposes that if she were a truly dedicated employee she would not be taking ten minutes of her valuable time in the office to write a blog post lamenting her shortened workday)

Anointed II

Thanks for the kind words on that last post. Two more thoughts about the bishop and his flask of oil--

The first: I was trying to remember how the Israelites had consecrated their altars, but my brain kept drifting over to this story. (My kids love that story. "Perhaps he is meditating!") Finally I looked it up: when the tabernacle was ready, Moses anointed the altar with oil to consecrate it for sacrifice.

The second: my friend Anneleisa told me she attended another rededication Mass recently. She said there was a note in the program about the women who helped to rub the oil into the altar, in an echo of the service of the women at the tomb on Good Friday -- preparing a fitting resting place for the precious broken body of Christ. (AL, if you see this, please let me know if I've got that wrong.)

God the Ancient of Days, who taught the Israelites how to offer sacrifice; God the Word made flesh, perfect victim and priest forever; God the eternal Son, whose sacrifice stands for all time and is miraculously present at each Mass. For a moment I could see it like a bright syzygy of truths. I wish I had the words to say it better, to share that little glimpse of Christ sovereign over time and eternity.

Anointed

Our church has just finished a yearlong renovation project. It is beautiful and today the bishop came to celebrate the re-dedication Mass. It began with the bishop accepting the keys from the pastor and blessing the water in the baptistry. I didn't see as much of it as I might have liked, because I was chasing a toddler unimpressed by miters and crosiers. There's one piece of the liturgy that I want to remember, though.

Before the liturgy of the Eucharist began, the bishop took off his golden chasuble and put on, no kidding, an apron. Someone brought him a vessel of oil -- not a dinky little cruet, but a big honking flask full of shining oil. He poured it onto the altar and rubbed it in, and I started thinking about writing this post (<-one of these days I will stop thinking about blogging during Mass). He wasn't done, though, not at all. Slowly he worked his way all around the altar, pouring the oil and rubbing it in. He took his time about it.

I remembered a retreat team I was part of, where one of the speakers talked about the ancient meanings of anointing with oil. He said that warriors would do it before battle, because it made them too slippery for their opponents to hold onto.

I thought about the young David, anointed with oil as a sign of God's favor.

I thought about chrism gleaming on my children's newly baptized faces. I am thinking now about my oldest, preparing for confirmation in the spring.

And I thought about the meaning of oil in cultures where food was scarcer -- where they could talk about "the oil of gladness" instead of asking for fat-free alternatives. I thought about the way that fat makes things taste more like themselves, makes them richer and more satisfying. I also thought about doughnuts for a while, because I am a deeply spiritual person. Really, though, there's a connection -- I was thinking about sufganiot and latkes, foods that celebrate an end to scarcity. There's an open-handed quality to those foods: it takes generosity to pour out that much oil in preparation for your feast.

By this time I was following Stella through the parish hall, but the Mass was visible on a big screen in there. I thought about the altar as a metaphor for Christian lives: a place that exists solely so the broken body of Christ can be lifted high. It prompted me to pray for our community: Make us too slippery for the enemy to keep hold of. Keep us faithful to our baptismal promises, faithful to your call. Pour out your goodness on us, and teach us to be open-handed in turn.

Also: thanks, God, for doughnuts.

Things I learned from (sort of) logging my 168 hours

I was going to do Laura Vanderkam's time-logging challenge this week, but the first thing I learned from it was that--

1. I hate logging my time. It's not so much the record-keeping as the labeling. I do a million things in the hour after I wake up in the morning. I can list them all, but the itemizing is impossible. If I am tossing dinner in the crockpot while I talk to my 10yo about how cool it would be if my superpower was that I could lift the lids off cans without using a can-opener, is that food prep time or interacting-with-my-children time? If I scoop the baby up on one hip and dance around the living room with her while packing up my stuff for work, is that mothering, exercise, or getting myself out the door? Carla nailed it in her comment here. So I don't have much of a time log but I learned (or remembered) some useful things anyway, including the fact that--
   
   
2. I thrive on goals and lists. I did well knocking things off my list for the week. I am very, very motivated by having a List-with-a-capital-L, but I need to find some middle ground: sometimes I make unreasonable lists and resolve to finish them or die trying; sometimes I don't make a list at all because I don't want to be its slave. You might think that making a list that included, say, prioritization or breaks for mandatory fun (is that an oxymoron?) would solve the problem, but it seems to be an ongoing issue. Once I write a list down, it feels like a law.
   
   
3. If I am well-rested, that is. Sleep affects my outlook on everything. Everything.
   
   
4. This computer, the one right here in my dining room, is a problem for me. It is most tractor-beam-ly in the afternoons when all the boys want to talk to me at once and I am supposed to be getting a meal on the table in time to get kids to soccer practice. This is also where my husband sits to veg in the evenings, so I can't just box it up and put it in the basement. But I'm thinking that might be a good idea, to get it out of the dining room. (I suppose I could just resolve to power it down between the end of naptime and the end of dinner clean-up. Or assign my oldest to write a little script that would make it whoop out a ferocious ah-ooooo-ga if I tried to sit down and goof off in that window. He'd like that.)
   
   
5. And last: accountability makes a difference in my willingness to push myself. When I started this experiment I thought I'd set up the time log as a Google spreadsheet and make it public. It was SO motivating for me on Monday, this idea that anyone would be able to see how I had spent my time. Facebook or dinner prep? Dinner prep, obviously.
   
   Posting my plans here is a great kick in the pants for me -- I did indeed finish a first draft of my early research project write-up by Wednesday, in large part because I had given myself that deadline in this space -- so maybe that's a way to keep myself moving forward. This week's #1 goal: go to bed at a reasonable hour every night. Eek.

All is vanity

Detachment is good, right? Humility likewise? I hope so, my friends, because OH did I have a memorable hair salon experience tonight.

I went to a swanky place by Gladlyville standards, a nicer place than I've been in years. I thought, Maybe I hate getting my hair cut because I'm always going to cheapo places. I'll go somewhere a little more upscale and see if I get better results.

Excuse me while I pause to laugh grimly.

She offered me a five-minute treatment to get any product build-up out of my hair and I hesitated. "Is it going to be hard on my hair?" I asked her. "My hair's pretty fragile." She assured me it would not. It would make my hair feel awesome! I've been using this stuff that gives me great curl definition but does tend to get gummy. I said yes. ALAS ALAS ALAS.

This treatment, whatever it was, turned my hair into one massive tangle. I was sure she had put a clip in it because I could feel it all stuck together in back. There was no clip -- just the most unbelievable snarl you have ever seen. Before tonight my hair was about bra-strap length when un-boinged, and the whole pile of it was glued together.

She proceeded to comb it out. She spent, no exaggeration, more than half an hour trying to get a comb through my hair. She kept kicking aside wads of it that she'd yanked out. Eventually she pulled out enough hair for a whole flock of birds to line their nests, with enough left over for me to knit a pair of socks from it. (Hand-knit hair socks -- mortification for the third millennium). My scalp is SO tender.

She recommended that I come back soon. She offered to make me an appointment on the spot. I declined. The cut is fine, I think, but at this moment I look like Roseanne Roseannadanna. And you know, I can look like Roseanne Roseannadanna for free.

It's a book review: 168 Hours

For my birthday my mother-in-law gave me a copy of Laura Vanderkam's book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think -- a well-timed gift given my summer plans. It's a well-written book with lots of intriguing facts and ideas, and it prompted a total bolt-from-the-blue moment. Vanderkam writes about living a life that emphasizes your core competencies. What are the things that you do best, the things nobody else can do as well? A twofold realization hit me like a ton of bricks: (1) Folding laundry is not one of my core competencies (2) One of my core competencies is teaching my children how to get along in the world, which means they need to learn how to take care of their clothing.

I'd been procrastinating on teaching my children to pick up more household responsibility, because I hate that learning curve. It almost always takes longer than you think it should, and in the beginning it's so much faster to just do the stupid job yourself. The book was a welcome smack upside the head: nobody was benefiting from my procrastination.

Vanderkam also writes about figuring out what you want to do, both at work and at play, and finding ways to fit it in. That's been really fun. It dawned on me that I miss exploring other languages, so I subscribed to Le Monde on my Kindle. It's a good level for me, and I think fifty cents a day is a reasonable fee for a painless way to hone my rusty French skills. (I don't read it cover to cover, just in case you wondered, and I skip most of the French political stuff. But even reading a handful of short articles each day will let me pick up new vocabulary and dust off forgotten grammatical knowledge.)

I also realized that I miss making music. One of the problems with being rusty is that the music I used to love to play is too hard, and I haven't felt like I had the time to get back to where I used to be. I put a book of easy music out on the piano, and I sent my flute off to be repaired (prompted by my fifth-grader's decision to learn flute this year). It's remarkable how much more refreshing it is to make music for ten minutes than to sit in front of the computer idly clicking for ten minutes. It would be hard for me to find an uninterrupted hour every day for two weeks to work on the Schumann piece I played when I was a senior in high school. Ten minutes is pretty easy, and I'm optimistic that it will help my fingers remember some of what they used to know.

My friend Carla said she couldn't get past Vanderkam's apparent disregard for full-time mothers, and I hear where she's coming from. The book talks a lot about how little full-time mothers actually interact with their kids, and how you can plan lots of fun activities with your kids even if you have a full-time job, but I just kept thinking of a line from The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding: Babies need quantities of quality time.

I also disagree with some of her time-saving strategies, like her recommendation that you hire a service rather than an individual if you want someone to help you clean your house. (ETA: her point being that you'd save time this way since they do the interviewing.) If I ever hire someone to clean for me, I will absolutely find someone who works for herself and expects a living wage. I'm not going to pay Merry Maids so they can pass along minimum wage to the women doing the hard work. It's been almost ten years since I read Nickel and Dimed, but it made an indelible impression on me. I'm not going to buy myself more free time in a way that keeps other women stuck in poverty.

Similarly, I'm not a fan of food recommendations like "buy frozen burritos so you can spend less time making lunch." Maybe I've read too many Michael Pollan books, but I'd rather use our family's food dollars elsewhere rather than supporting Big Food (source of the vast majority of frozen burritos) and all it stands for: the untrammeled food-borne pathogens, the toothless FDA, Eric Schlosser saying he told us so, etc.

Those are fairly minor quibbles, though; they reminded me of reading the Tightwad Gazette and thinking, "I am NEVER going to be poor enough to cut blocks for my children out of my empty styrofoam meat trays." Laura Vanderkam, like Amy Dacyczyn, has plenty of good things to say despite the bits that make me go hmm. Now I have to stop writing and go to bed, because I"m logging my time use this week and finding that it makes me less likely to ignore the clock. The end.

PS One of the perils of blogging quickly is that you sacrifice clarity in the interest of time. I'm not saying that it's evil to buy frozen burritos, only that they're a purchase with hidden costs. Vanderkam seems skeptical in general about the choice to spend time making things with one's hands over making things with one's brain (she sounds a bit derisive about knitting, too, which is one of my favorite things to do with a spare ten minutes). I wonder if she fails to see that putting some time into cooking allows a person to become a better and faster cook, one who can fling together a tasty, cheap, and nutritious meal in about as much time as it takes to bake a pan of pre-packaged frozen lasagna -- one who will have many more opportunities to teach her kids about the pleasures of time spent in the kitchen and how to feed themselves for a lifetime.

Less Crazy

Following up: I emailed two of the three soccer teams and the other Scout family and got two promising replies. I emailed the special ed teacher. I took my medication pre-emptively two days in a row instead of waiting to be annoyed by how much I need it. Much nicer.

I cleared out a space upstairs for the rocking chair and my husband hauled it up from the basement. Rocking Stella to sleep has been going better than I expected, actually. Teaching new sleep associations is usually slow, IME.

Darn it, I meant to show you a picture of the sock whose mate I cast on today as my brainless project, but I forgot to take one. This would not be a big deal except that I just transferred a boatload of pictures and I thought I had all the pictures I needed to update my neglected Ravelry notebook. Here, how about a picture of a July/August project instead: Hey Teach in Second Time Cotton. Color is called Artichoke, which is a perfect name for it. And these are my two tricky projects: the beaded Kernel scarf and the Autumn Rose sweater. They may take me a long time to complete because I am slogging through a morass of kids' socks at the moment (a morass of my own making, says the person who told four boys they could pick any yarn and any pattern and who has been wondering ever since if anyone ever died of twisted rib).

I couldn't get my hair cut and I couldn't make a doctor's appointment -- I'll call tomorrow about both of those. And now I am drop-kicking myself off to bed, 15 minutes past my scheduled launching time. More about time management tomorrow!

Seven Quick Takes: Things That Are Making Me Crazy Edition

1. Evening activities. I have three boys in soccer this year, which means four dinnertime practices and a coach who is lobbying for a fifth. Ai yi yi. Also: Scouts, confirmation prep, and games club, all starting between 6 and 6:30. Dislike!
2. My hair. It is falling out left and right, with the result that it looks like goats have been chewing on it. It is EVERYWHERE. I was cutting my hair out of the vacuum cleaner's beater brush on Monday and thinking, "If anyone else in this house left this much hair in his (or her) wake, I would REQUIRE him (or her) to go get a buzz cut." Also: the Nexxus people have reformulated Humectress. I have been a loyal Humectress customer since I was in high school, because it was like Haldol for my crazy hair. Harrumph.
3. My heart. The littlest things have been triggering my arrhythmia. I feel tense so I have more arrhythmia episodes and the feeling of my flying heart makes me tense.
4. A general dearth of fun. I am not exercising because the last time I went for a run it made my chest hurt, which raised some red flags for me in light of this recent change in my arrhythmia. I am not blogging and I do love to blog. I am hardly seeing my friends at all. I have a super-fun knitting project in progress (Kernel in peacock blue Malabrigo with extra beads -- love it), but the baby who usually knows not to mess with Mama's knitting thinks that Mama's knitting + beads is a completely different ballgame, one which she should be allowed to play. This is not, in case you wondered, conducive to lace-knitting.
5. Bedtime. I am spending a lot of time getting the toddler to sleep. By the time the big boys are in bed I just want to wrap the quiet around me like a superhero cape and jump off the back of the couch in elation because the house is finally still. This would not be a completely crazy idea (only a moderately crazy one) except I want to keep doing this (figuratively, you understand) until 11:00. Which is too late for me to go to bed if I hope to be pleasant and smiley the next morning.
6. School transition stuff. My son who gets some special ed support has a new teacher who thinks his problem is just that he just needs to slow down and try harder. This makes me ever so slightly ballistic. I am talking to the special ed teacher about how to approach it so I don't burn any bridges with the classroom teacher, but GRRRRR. My kindergartner needs a little extra help learning to get himself off to school with a reasonable lunch and off to soccer practice with all of his gear. He doesn't make me crazy in the slightest (I could eat that boy UP with a spoon and then a straw for the melty bits after (which might sound even crazier than jumping off my couch while pretending to be Quiet Queen, faster than a speeding sound wave, but it's late at night and you are getting the unexpurgated me to think of what you will (and how's that for a run-on parenthetical construction?))), but I keep forgetting that I need to allow some extra time for it.
7. My secret fear that I am hopelessly lazy and that's why I'm having a hard time getting a paper drafted for publication. There's this balance in academic writing that's kind of tricky for me. You have to leave yourself enough time to think, because you're writing stuff that requires thought. But you have to keep moving forward, even if you write "must find out more about this part" and "aagghhh why am I such a terrible writer?" as placeholders. If you don't, you find yourself (or at least I find myself) sliding over to Google Reader instead of doing the hard work of thinking and getting the words down in a row. Blech.

Things I am going to do in order to feel less crazy (am I going to get booted out of 7 Quick Takes if I have 14 things?):

1. Email the other parents on all three soccer teams to see if anyone might like to carpool. Email the other Boy Scout mom in the neighborhood, ditto. People don't seem to carpool for those activities but BOY I wish they did. Also: serve "tea" at 4:15 (in lieu of dinner at a reasonable person's dinnertime), featuring new-to-me low-stress recipes from this blog. Elwood doesn't get home until after 6, and it will be good to have something that can wait in the crockpot and stay warm for him.
2. Go get three inches of hair cut off, somewhere besides the cheap neighborhood place I usually go. If not this weekend, Tuesday night.
3. Bite the bullet and make a doctor's appt. Add "take beta blocker" to my list of morning tasks so I stop forgetting.
4. Do a time log. I have been meaning to blog about Laura Vanderkam's book, and this week is especially timely. Remind myself that I don't have to run hard for 30 minutes to get some benefit from exercise: I can bike over to church instead of driving. I can do a few dozen push-ups. Cast on something simple and pretty so I can knit in spare moments when the toddler's on the loose, instead of thinking wistfully about the beaded project.
5. Start teaching the baby to fall asleep while I rock her (instead of walking her or driving her). Tuck Joe in earlier and give him permission to read by flashlight for half an hour, so I don't miss the baby's sleepy window. Send the big boys to bed half an hour earlier with permission to read for a bit. Tie myself up with baling twine and drop-kick the resulting bundle of procrastination into bed by 10:30.
6. Get the email out of the draft folder and into the special ed teacher's mailbox. She has surely dealt with this many times before.
7. Finish an article draft by Wednesday -- just crank it out in git-'er-done mode, giving myself permission to write atrocious-sounding sentences in the pursuit of a finished first draft.

I'll udpate Sunday. More quick takes here.

Guilty as charged

I dropped my oldest son off at a friend's house this afternoon. "You don't need me to give you that speech about being an especially good guest since it's your first time visiting, right?"

"No," he said nicely but firmly. "I have heard that speech many times in my short and speech-filled life."

I have been cracking up all afternoon about his "short and speech-filled life." That boy knows exactly how to make his mother laugh.