Happy Birthday MRD!

Happy 11th Birthday, my beautiful Millenium baby!
You were born 11 years ago at 6:32 a.m., sweetly and easily like everything else about you!
Most of all, I was amazed and bemused by the fact that you were...a GIRL! And what a girly girl, from day one! In the hospital I got pink flowers, pink balloons, and Aunt Sally quickly brought up a new pink outfit for you to wear home. Baby Gap was doing pink angels that winter, and that couldn't have been more perfect for you. With Valentine's Day right around the corner, you were often decked out in hearts too, of course. And by the time we got home, Sally had turned the nursery pink, pink, pink with new clothes and goodies for you! The afternoon after you were born, we settled in for a sweet nap together and I remember watching the snow fall outside the hospital window--just like today (the snow--sadly, not the nap!). Later that day, 16-month-old big brother WWD arrived for a pizza dinner and a look at his "sissy." Lots of kisses and hugs all around, of course, before Sally whisked him back to bedtime!
Then Daddy and I got to work trying to figure out your name! You see, you really surpised us by being a girl; I'm not sure why that was so. It took us two days to finalize your perfect name, which couldn't be more perfect...just like you!!
I love you so much and I'm savoring these precious tweenage years with you, my wise and beautiful MRD!

Day of Penance

God and Father of Life,
You have created every human person,
And have opened the way for each to have eternal life.
We live in the shadow of death.

Tens of millions of your children have been killed
because of the Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion.
Father, have mercy on us.

Heal our land
And accept our offering of prayer and penance.
In your love for us,
Turn back the scourge of abortion.
May each of us exult in hearts full of hope
And hands full of mercy
And work together to build a culture of life.

We pray through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Quick Takes Friday

Joining Jen at Conversion Diary for Quick Takes Friday!

~ 1 ~
Just getting through January, here at Chez D. Does everyone always feel that way in January? Just getting through it. Our one big bright spot is MRD's 11th birthday, coming up at the end of the month.

~ 2 ~
This week I have been knocked out with the flu and slept for, like, three days now. I am so thankful that my wonderful BILL has taken over pretty much everything around here so that I can sleep! This flu (sinus infection? whatever!) has been weird because the first symptom was that I woke up on Monday with hugely puffy, swollen eyes, before I even felt sick. Never had that before!

~ 3 ~

Recently overheard at our house (about 9,746 times):

"MPD, time to put on your boots!" (or any other request or comment directed at our sassy little love bug)

"No, no. Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!"

This was very cute, like, the first 30 or 40 times he said it.

~ 4 ~
WWD is going winter camping this weekend with his Scout troop. Although there will be cabins, the boys have the option of digging snow caves to sleep in. Guess which one WWD's going to choose? Of course--snow cave. His mom just hopes that someone makes him wear a hat, because if it's up to him, as I hear daily..."Oh, mom, I don't need a coat/gloves/earband! It's no big deal!" Brrrr!

~ 5 ~
This was a great week to be sick with the flu. FREEZING here. And I didn't have to go outside at all for 3 whole days. Did I mention how much I love my husband?

~ 6 ~
Anyone else out there ever feel like they just can NOT go on another minute? You know...overwhelmed with life and want to run away? Me too. I'm just saying. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

~ 7 ~
And on a lighter note...
Have you seen this commercial with the Geico woodchucks?
We love it! We can't stop calling JPD and MPD our "woodchucks." It's just a little too close to home, for sure!

Happy January, everyone!!
And go see Jen for everyone else's great Quick Takes posts!

Speaking the Truth in Love

To My Dear Friend,

I'm so impressed by your persistence and determination as you're enduring this extended spiritual dry spell. It reminds me of the woman in Matthew's gospel (15:22-28) whose perseverance was so richly rewarded. And what a blessing to know that Our Lord shared every single one of our trials during His time of sorrow in that long-ago garden; it seems almost incredible, doesn't it, that His Father truly let Him go it alone?

Of course, I hardly think I have all the answers, and I couldn't presume to have walked in your shoes through a lifetime of ups and downs within our Church. But as I reflected on our discussion, a couple of additional thoughts occurred to me. I wanted to share them in case they might be helpful in your search to "have what she's having," as we discussed.

One thought is this: Might there be a connection between your frustration with the God of your childhood and your own rejection of so many things that His Church teaches? Unequivocal, absolute sanctity of life, with no exceptions, along with a traditional definition of Holy Matrimony that dates all the way back to the days of the Garden of Eden are hardly trivial doctrines within Catholicism. If these don't make sense to you, that seems like a pretty fundamental difference, don't you think? You say that your heart is open to God; is your intellect? Could it be that you are the one turning away from God, and not the other way around?

Of course, it has always been fashionable to diss the Catholic Church, and our own Bishop takes a lot of heat for his adherence to Church Tradition in matters of faith and morals. It's a popular argument that the Church should "get with the times." Indeed, at first glance it can seem like the Church is absurdly backwards, patriarchal, and repressive. Who are these old celibate men, after all, to tell us how to plan and structure our families?

As it turns out, they're the spiritual descendants of Jesus' twelve apostles. Jesus gave Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven, of course, promising that "you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" and assuring the apostles "whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." (Matthew 16:18-19) He also promised (Luke 24:49) and sent (Acts 2) the Holy Spirit to guard the deposit of faith, which has ensured the infallibility of the Church's core doctrine for the subsequent 2000 years.

As I've studied Church history, I've found it startling that despite the all-too-human failings of the human beings to whom Christ entrusted the Church, the Holy Spirit truly has guarded the deposit of faith through all these centuries. "The Church should change with the times," people say. But which times? 21st century secular-progressive USA? 10th Century Norway? 16th Century Germany? 19th Century Spain?

"On this rock I will build my church." The Church is a rock; it doesn't change, and it's one of the very few things that doesn't. To me, that seems valuable, like a compass showing us the true north.

Who am I--a speck, compared with 2000 years of scholarship and holiness, carried out by men, but supervised and guarded by the Holy Spirit--to determine that the Church of Jesus Christ should change to suit my own ideas about how life should be? Isn't it more likely that I (the speck!) should change? Might it be that through His Son, Holy Scripture, the Apostles, and the Church, God has given us an owner's manual for how to achieve real happiness, both in this life and eternally?

And so, with plenty of prayer, study, tears, feeble attempts at humility, and even feebler attempts at obedience, I have changed. The more I learn about our beautiful Church and her teachings, the more amazed I am at their truth and beauty. I hope I keep changing, because holiness is, of course, the pursuit of a lifetime!

As in Chesterton's awesome quote: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." I think too many people write off the Church's teachings because they seem so absurdly difficult when compared to our society's portrayal of the path to happiness. Of course they do. God's kingdom involves a "narrow gate" (Matthew 7:13), after all, and even some of Jesus' disciples turned away from Him, saying "This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?" (John 6:60) Pride and disobedience were also, of course, at the very core of Judas' final betrayal of Our Lord.

My friend, I promised to pray for you. To tell you the truth, I have been all along, and of course I promise to keep doing so. Please keep praying for me too, so that we may both respond as Peter did when Jesus asked if he too would follow the departing disciples:

"Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life."

+JMJ+ Thy Will Be Done! +JMJ+

Our Own Ace of Cakes

MRD's got big dreams as a baker. This weekend she used her new cake decorating set to make her first real, baked-from-scratch, all-by-herself cake:Delicious! Amazing! What a beautiful creation!
(And the cake was good too!)

He Serves! He Shoots! He Scores!

...and he celebrates the Packers' victory against the Falcons! WWD has been quite busy this weekend, with three basketball games and serving at an early-morning Mass today.WWD's basketball season is roaring along; his team's record is something like 14-2, so far.
He's loving it; and so is his mom. :)
Go WWD!

New Year's Resolution

Imagine that you wake up one morning to discover that you weigh 15 pounds more than you thought you did. Pretty scary, right?

Last week on the scale at the health club that happened to me. Talk about a wake up call! How is it possible that I've gained 15 pounds since last summer...when I should have lost 15 pounds since last summer?

Actually, it wasn't as bad as I first thought; it turns out that my own scale at home is off by about 12 pounds, so I'd only gained about 3 over the holidays and not the 15 I first thought. But still. Still. It was ever so motivating. (I have a perfect "before" picture from Christmas, too, but no way am I posting it! Maybe when I have an "after" photo to go with it!)

I'm going for baby steps here, because I want to be in this for the long haul. My goal is just to exercise more (more than none is easy, right?) and eat like a normal person instead of like every meal is my last and the food is trying to run away from me. Even with just baby steps (if 6 days of working out is really baby steps), I lost 3.1 pounds this week.

Most of all, I'm working on changing inside my head. Taking care of myself is not selfish or vain or frivolous or the lowest priority in the family; it's serious business. If I don't, I'll end up with a stroke and/or diabetes in another decade or two, which will be when MPD's a teenager and, God willing, my babies are starting to have their babies. No more excuses about having been pregnant for a decade, being over forty, taking medication, being busy, etc., etc. No more self-destructive behavior that I've been doing because...why? I'm not sure. Hopefully I don't have to figure that out in order to turn things around!

Stay tuned for that "after" picture! :)

Saint for the Third Millenium

One of the things that I love best about Catholicism is its incredible depth; no doubt, one lifetime isn't even close to enough to learn every facet of our beautiful faith. Reading Faustina, Saint for Our Times reminded me about this aspect of the Church. I'm repeatedly amazed at how much God continues to be intimately involved in the details of this world that He created. Clearly, His plan of salvation continues to unfold, and He is at work in our world in the 21st century just as much as in the times of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses.

The story of St. Faustina makes this especially clear, as her message of Divine Mercy is so powerful and relevant to us in modern times. I found her connection with John Paul II to be especially intriguing. At the 2002 consecration of the International Shrine of Divine Mercy in Lagievniki, Poland, he said:

"I will solemnly entrust the world to Divine Mercy. I do so with the burning desire that the message of God's merciful love, proclaimed here through Saint Faustina, may be made known to all the peoples of the earth and fill their hearts with hope. May this message radiate from this place to our beloved homeland and throughout the world."

and

"Where, if not in the Divine Mercy, can the world find refuge and the light of hope?"

John Paul II not only established Divine Mercy Sunday, he even completed his days on earth on the vigil of Divine Mercy, 2005.

Rev. George W. Kosicki, CSB, the author of Faustina, Saint for Our Times is uniquely qualified to introduce us to this beautiful saint. His extensive study of her life and surroundings and, of course, her Diary helps make this book a perfect introduction to Saint Faustina and the message of Divine Mercy. Fr. Kosicki includes chapters on St. Faustina's life, her mission, her spiritual life, her connection to both eastern and western facets of the Catholic faith, her relevance to the third millennium, and a discussion of our response, as well as a section with Divine Mercy prayers and finally a Divine Mercy timeline.

Overall, I would very much recommend this book. It's a perfect introduction to the Divine Mercy devotion, especially good for anyone who's considering tackling reading St. Faustina's Diary. It truly gave me a good understanding of Divine Mercy, which is quite exciting as well as comforting in our turbulent modern times!

This review was written as part of the Catholic book reviewer program from The Catholic Company. Visit The Catholic Company to find more information on Faustina, Saint for Our Times and check out their great selection of serenity prayer and baptism gifts.

Disclaimer: The Catholic Company provides books for review free of charge to its reviewers. Come join the fun!

Quick Takes--New Year's Edition

Ringing in 2011 with a few miscellaneous quick takes...

1. Today is 1-1-11. Pretty cool, huh? Looking forward to 11-11-11 also, of course.

2. Last night we had fun celebrating New Year's Eve with treats and root beer floats. See...

3. I was thinking about making new year's resolutions, and a couple of things came to mind. Imagine my dismay when I checked out my resolutions from 2010, and they turned out to be the exact same things I was thinking about for 2011. #@&%*$(#!! Whatever. New Year's resolutions are stupid, right?

4. This week the kids and I have been geeking out just a bit and having a sci-fi film festival, watching Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, a moonwalk documentary, and, tonight, Star Trek. Back in the day, I was a bit of a sci-fi fan; it was one of my favorite short-story genres to write in, even. (What a little nerd I was!) We had fun watching the movies. The only problem was Battlestar Galactica, which I should have previewed. WAY too racy for my sweeties, in my opinion, and a bit too scary for JPD. Especially since he was quite surprised afterwards when I clarified that the movie was not true! Yikes! No, JPD, evil robot people with blinking red uni-eyes are not trying to destroy mankind! The next morning, he watched the moonwalk documentary three times in a row in the van, and I think we both felt much better.

5. Anyone else get a Swiffer duster from their husband for Christmas? No kidding! Come on...you know you're jealous!

6. The little boys and I have been swimming most days this week at the health club. Fun fun fun. :) And Mommy got some workouts in too!

7. I love the week between Christmas and New Year's; it is always so peaceful and relaxed. I must say that we've been eating, drinking, and even sleeping a lot. Most of the snow has melted from our two days of warm weather; now it's freezing again (and I mean Wisconsin freezing!). I'm sad that vacation is over, but I've also had enough of all this slacking. I'm ready for the new year to begin! I can't even imagine what we'll be up to this time next year. Really...could be anything. Will Bill find a job? (Will he try?) Or will I? Will we move? Will we have another baby? Will we have a great sadness, such as we had in 2010 several times over? Will we manage to do something cool (like have a grownup-only getaway, maybe, for a night or a weekend) for Bill's 50th birthday next fall? All I can say is...stay tuned!

+JMJ+ Thy Will Be Done!!! +JMJ+

Christmas Trains with Grandma

Today the boys and Grandma and I went to the botanical gardens to see the Christmas train exhibit.It was beautiful!
Today and tomorrow our weather is so warm that the snow is melting and everything is all wet, melty, mushy, and very foggy.Quite a nice finale for 2010, I would say! We are looking forward to a weekend of relaxing and celebrating the beginning of 2011!

Sledding!

Home for the Holidays

Every once in a while during the holidays, I get lonely and blue about the fact that I'm so far from home (Texas) with most of our relatives more than a thousand miles away. My entire family--except for my mom, of course--is in Texas, and two of Bill's siblings live in Philadelphia; we rarely get to see them. When I want to start really feeling sorry for myself, I mope around about my kids' startling shortage of grandparents--with my dad and both Bill's parents deceased, it makes us extra thankful to have my mom here with us.

What a contrast from my own childhood, surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and my parents who had grown up together from childhood. There certainly was no shortage of relatives around for the holidays in those early years!

But now, here I am in the frozen arctic Midwest, far from home and family. If I let myself think about it too much, I could get sad about the fact that our holidays regularly consist of just our party of seven, plus one grandma. Sometimes we get Bill's sister and her husband and daughter, and the kids love it when we do. But mostly, we're on our own for making and celebrating family traditions.


And you know what? It's all good. I could get all lonely, blue, and sad about our little party of seven--but when I start going down that path, I just put that out of my head. Our own little family has plenty of traditions of our own, and we're making memories that will be every bit as special to my kids as mine are to me. My kids, after all, aren't comparing our Christmases to the ones I had forty years ago in Texas. Ours are all they've got; and to me it seems that things are pretty awesome around here. To tell you the truth, this year things have been especially beautiful and--hard to say this but--perfect.
I think, when it comes to relatives, that we each have to just make the best of whatever hand we've been dealt. I never would have imagined that my kids would have such a shortage of grandparents, or that I'd live so far off on my own, but that's the way God has set it up, and what else can I do but be thankful and happy? What a miracle, after all, that our party of seven is intact! I think losing my dad when I was 18 has helped me not to take the family I have for granted. I know it makes me more aware that each day we have together is precious.Sometimes I do dream of having a houseful of extended family for Christmas. Maybe someday we'll move back to Texas and that will be so. But this year, for the first time, I began to foresee a day in the future when I'll surely have that houseful of family. It will come in another decade or two (aka the blink of an eye), when I'm the grandma, and my house is full of the next generation. And isn't carrying things on to the next generation what family traditions are really all about?

Merry Christmas!

He's Coming!

"Behold God incarnate! How beautiful it has been to reflect on the very profound mystery of our Savior's incarnation! ...

"Finally, someday in heaven above, we will grasp it fully. There we will celebrate with an incomparable delight this great feast of Christmas."

~ St. Francis de Sales

My Sweets Making Sweets

Christmas baking has always kind of just eluded me.

I am always humbled by people (like my sister-in-law, the amazing master baker and goddess of all things domestic) who can pull together those incredibly beautiful cookie trays like this:


What must that take, I've always thought, like three or four days of straight baking? How can anyone pull that off while simultaneously doing other pre-Christmas activities?This year I guess I figured it out.We have made eight or so different kinds of cookies lately, as well as a huge vat of cranberry-almond-orange caramel popcorn, and it wasn't even hard.Messy, for sure, but not hard.I think it has to do with not being pregnant, not having anyone under 12 months old in our family , and not having just moved into our house during the last three months. Imagine that!Oh yes, and the fact that MRD and KLD can pretty much do everything by themselves now. Here's a small sample of their beautiful creations:
I admit I do still have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Christmas baking.
But this year, it's almost all just love.

Early Christmas Present

Tonight was my turn to drive WWD's basketball carpool. It's just far enough away--about 30 minutes--that it's not worth making the round trip twice, so I planned to just hang out at the gym during practice.

Which would give me, I realized, just over an hour to myself. As in--alone. Far from my chore-filled, to-do laden house.

What would I do? Bring a book? Bring my laptop? Catch up on phone calls? Squeeze in a few errands? I was so excited about the sudden empty block on my calendar that I was overwhelmed--stumped as to how to fill this one free hour, on the dark night after the snowy winter solstice, three days before Christmas.

I dropped off the boys, went to fill up my van with gas and wiper fluid (the latter being something I never once did in my entire life before moving to the midwest), and started back to watch practice.

For no particular reason, I decided to take a quick detour through the parking lot of the Catholic church a block away from WWD's practice gym. Just to check it out--peek at their school, that sort of thing.

The church lights were on.

"Cool," I thought, peering through the church's glass doors from inside my warm van. I'll just say a little "hello" prayer while I'm so near to the Lord.

I even thought I could see the red tabernacle candle, but it turned out to be my brake lights reflecting in the church window.

Then I saw it. The monstrance on the altar. Could it be? Yes. Right there, in the small-town church, on this dark solstice night, miles away from the retail frenzy that has filled the rest of my week...Eucharistic Adoration.


An hour of Adoration, all alone. Quiet. Peace. A whole, uninterrupted Rosary, all by myself, without the phone ringing and without me falling asleep after about the first decade. And then...more peace.

My dear sweet infant Lord Jesus, how can my family's Christmas celebration ever be a worthy birthday party for You, the most holy and amazing gift the world has ever known? How can we ever, ever comprehend God's glorious plan for mankind or His eternal and infinite love for each of His precious creatures?

As St. Paul explained to those long-ago Corinthians, "For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know as I am known."

And as St. Matthew wrote, "Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him." Tonight, He sure knew what I needed...more of Himself!!

Could there be a better Christmas present than a sweet, silent hour with my Lord? I felt like I got a little peek at the Nativity itself!

O Come Let Us Adore Him
Christ the Lord!

Quick Takes Friday

Joining Jen at Conversion Diary for Quick Takes Friday!
It turns out that this week's Takes are not really all so Quick. Some are actually quite long. Sorry!

~ 1 ~
I have no idea what to get my husband for Christmas. I never have any ideas. He is the most frugal person in the universe, never buys anything for himself, and regularly returns the gifts I choose (even an IPod, a while back). I'm resorting to the strategy of giving him several gifts that are so small, they are not worth the trouble of returning. Sad, isn't it?

But seriously--not to be too overly cynical here--most adults don't really need Christmas gifts, do they? Bill and I are always fixated on getting each other things we need--is this the right strategy? After all, there is an entire genre of retail establishments--Sharper Image, Brookstone, Hammacher Schlemmer, practically everything in that SkyMall magazine in your seatback pocket--that sell absolutely nothing that anyone would ever need. These stores exist, I believe, because no one really has any good idea what to get their husband for Christmas.

~ 2 ~
I keep re-learning the ever-shocking concept that when I eat healthy food, I feel good, and when I eat junk, I feel like junk. Amazing corollary, that. In the former category, I can't wait to try this recipe.

~ 3 ~
I think this is WWD's best school year ever. He loves school; he's appropriately challenged which in turn makes him highly motivated; he's having a great time with his friends; he's got great grades; and he's doing a really good job of managing his schoolwork independently, even with a really busy extracurricular schedule). I am so thrilled--this is finally, really, truly where WWD belongs. (For now, anyway.)

~ 4 ~
I realized all that stuff about WWD a week or so ago when I was in a conference with both of KLD's teachers, about her math. We were talking about the school's math curriculum, discussing how it transferred into middle school, and I was a bit embarrassed to admit that I hadn't laid eyes on one single scrap of math work from WWD this whole school year. He made an A, so I guess that's okay, right?

KLD, on the other hand, is slogging through the harrowing nightmare that is this 4th grade math curriculum. What a mess! The information seems to be presented in quite a roundabout way--several different methods to solve each type of problem, a requirement to "write to explain" in words how you got your answers, and lots and lots of estimating answers before working the actual problem.

The faculty assures us that this is the latest thinking in how to teach math, but all I see is my daughter, who has always loved math best of all, starting to struggle with it for the first time, and taking all evening to complete her homework because the book is so hard to follow.

I haven't made up my mind what to do about this--I can always just supplement her math at home with Singapore, but my real concern is that this gobbledygook math is going to ruin her math confidence and burn her out on math. In my own experience, this can be a big deal. I wish I could opt her out of the school math, and teach her at home. If the public schoolers can opt out of sex ed, don't you think I should be able to opt my daughter out of math? We'll see, I suppose. But in the meantime...got any advice?

~ 5 ~
My beautiful budding musicians have been filling my house--and the town, a little bit--with the sounds of Christmas! Yesterday morning was the school concert, featuring MRD on clarinet and both MRD and KLD on piano, along with their friends. Last weekend WWD joined them for was their quite-festive piano recital. And MRD both sang a solo and played her clarinet in the school Christmas pageant this week. I am so proud of their hard work on their music--and so glad that they are enjoying it so much!

~ 6 ~
On a much more somber note, as I'm sitting down to write my Christmas cards this year, I've realized that my list is shorter than last year by 4 people who have died in 2010. (That doesn't even include Bill's friend Jim, who died tragically in his forties last January.) Unbelievable. What a year--I suppose I'm ready to put 2010 in the past! May God bless our dear ones and grant them eternal rest.

~ 7 ~
You know what? Bill's job being eliminated last August was--no kidding--the best thing that could have happened. He is like a whole different person without that nasty job from H-E-doublehockeysticks, and now I have my husband back. He is (mostly) happy, relaxed, enjoying the kids, and we are having fun hanging out while the kids are at school. Too much fun...as in, we can't keep this up forever. At least one of us has got to start bringing in some cash pretty soon, methinks!

One more delicious week until Christmas!! Enjoy!!
And go see Jen for everyone else's great Quick Takes posts!

My Second Favorite Thing About Catholic School

Their darling Christmas pageant!
It was adorable and everyone did such a great job!




P.S. My first favorite thing about our Catholic school...the kids go to Mass twice a week, one of which is a special Mass just for them where they participate as readers, gift-bearers, etc. I like lots of things about the kids' school--Mass and celebrating real-live Christian holidays top my list!