Daybook, Volume 46

Monday, January 31st, 2011

I am wearing jeans, wool socks, two shirts and a zip up fleece hoodie.

I am drinking Starbucks Colombian roast.  Mmmmm.

The weather is cold!  It's 19 degrees here in Nebraska, and a layer of ice was laid down last night on the streets, trees, sidewalks, and cars.  My husband called from work and instructed me to stay at home.  He said that driving conditions are awful!  We're looking at snow tonight and tomorrow with 6-8 inches expected.

My kids are on the mend!  A bug went around the house, influenza, I think.  The kids came down with it one by one, beginning with a fever, lethargy, congestion, and continued with a cough that just won't go away.  Morgan ended up in the ER on Tuesday; when I called her doctor and explained her symptoms--fatigue, fever, congestion, bad headache, and vertigo--he told me to take her to the ER for tests.  She was a trooper.  The nurses put in an IV and gave her 500 mL of fluid, and a CT scan, given because of the length and strength of her headache, turned up a severe sinus infection.  With antibiotics, she's feeling much better!

I hear Playhouse Disney in the background, the white noise of our fireplace running, water simmering in an effort to humidify the house, and coffee brewing. 

Out with the old.... We agreed to purchase cable television for one year, the year that I'd be recovering from a cesarean and nursing a new baby.  The year is up.  We subscribed to Netflix, installed Wi-Fi, and can stream to our Blu-Ray player.  We will cancel cable and enjoy Netflix now.  I'm excited about this!  We've been very impressed with Netflix so far and have gotten almost all the way through the first season of Lost, something we've wanted to watch for several years. 

I remember my (maternal) Grandpa making eggs for me in the wee hours of the morning when I was 18.  I lived with my maternal grandparents during my first year of college.  I would get home from work at 4 a.m., shower, and Grandpa would cook eggs for me.  Now he is 88, curled up in a hospital bed unresponsive, systems failing one by one.  Although he is comfortable and has defeated many diseases and injuries, I do not think that he will be with us much longer.  Please pray for his comfort! 

I had fun ice skating with my brothers and sister yesterday.  We were at my (paternal) Grandparents' home.  They have an acreage with a pond.  At first, Grandpa said that the ice was not solid enough for us to play on it.  My brothers were bound and determined to play.  They chopped a hole in the ice and found that it was six inches thick.  This is Grandpa's lower boundary for "safe to stomp on."  I grabbed skates and headed down to the pond when I saw my 6' 4" and my 6' brothers sliding and playing around on the ice.  Many followed suit, and while I was skating, my Grandpa put my girls in ice skates and sent them down.  It was invigorating!

Ice skating!

Courtney

Madeleine and me

I tried to help Morgan along. 

She tried hard but was unsteady.

Sophie and Madeleine

Goofing off

Nope.  I can't really skate like this.

Morgan

Courtney (my brother's girlfriend) and me

Courtney and Leighton

Madeleine, me, and Morgan

Madeleine got right back up every time she fell (often).

My Low last week was my root canal taking Morgan to the ER for tests. I was afraid she had meningitis. So was her doctor. That's why he sent us. She was so miserable!

My High last week was hearing Maria (11 months) say, "uh-oh!" when she dropped items. She'll identify "Dad" and "Go-gah" for Morgan. It's so fun to hear her try to copy our words and sounds.

I am thinking of starting a private blog, attached to this one, about divorce.  You may not know that my parents, after nearly 20 years of marriage and 9 children, are divorced.  Divorce does not end when a couple walks out of the courtroom, especially when there are children involved, and now grandchildren.  Would anyone be interested in joining, reading, or contributing as an author?  It would be a forum for thoughts, experiences, and emotions.  It would be geared toward grown children of divorce who wish to share these things in the privacy of my/our own blog.
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Cheers to the original Simple Woman's Daybook!

Marriage and Life

We attended Nebraska's Walk for Life today. Because of this, my mind has been on all things reproductive. I've been thinking about sex and how I would explain its intricacies to someone who isn't Catholic or doesn't subscribe to sex au natural, so to speak.

I would liken sex to food. Now bear with me. Sex is to marriage what food is to a body (emphasis on marriage). Its two-fold purpose is to nourish the marriage through intimacy between spouses, even on a hormonal level, and to transmit life, just as food nourishes a body and keeps it alive.

Birth control is forbidden to Catholics. Some Catholics think that the Church should stay out of their bedrooms but I roll my eyes at this. Puh-lease. People who say that don't see the truth. The truth is that birth control is detrimental to marriage. It is wrong on so many levels for so many reasons.

Take condoms, for example. The great condom is heralded as protection, purported to make sex safe between strangers by putting a barrier between their bodies (not really!) and preventing pregnancy and the transmission of disease. Snort. It's leading people into a false sense of security for a thousand reasons. First, condoms do not prevent the transmission of disease. HPV, for example, is transmitted from one person to another via skin to skin contact, not sexual intercourse only. Condoms are often used improperly--if the use of one could even be considered proper--and do not do what they are intended to do. Here's the thing: if I'm going to liken food to sex, I'll offer this comparison. If someone really wanted to eat dessert but didn't want the extra calories, would they slide a latex tube down their throat so they could taste, chew, and swallow, then draw the tube out later and throw it away? Ew. My stomach turned just thinking about it. Most people would consider that weird and possibly even disgusting. I'm leaning toward disgusting.

What about "The Pill", then? The Pill is a drug that causes a function organ/system to malfunction. How is that okay with everyone? The Pill interferes with ovulation and if it does allow ovulation and conception occurs, it prevents implantation. Going with the food and unwanted caloric intake comparison again, would someone take a medication that causes their stomach, small intestine, and colon to malfunction so that it did not absorb the food and they just excrete the barely digested food? That'll do a body good, right? Gross. That's wrong on so many levels. So is The Pill.

Only in a Catholic Home

Would one find an NFP chart sitting in a pile of school pictures and papers beneath leftover bread....

....and find a stack of diapers sitting on a baggie of wet wipes right beside a statue of the Blessed Virgin.

Geology Corner: Fossils and ANDRILL

My sister brought me fossils from Kansas.  The site at which she found them is about five minutes from where she lives.

As any good geologist would do (yes, I am brave enough to call myself a geologist albeit an amateur), I included a penny in these pictures, for scale.

During the late Cretaceous period, a sea covered the middle of North America.  Read about it HERE.

Because of the seaway, we find fossils of sea creatures here in the midwest, not dinosaurs.  Sure, there's the occasional Mosasaur or Plesiosaur, but mostly, we're blessed with bivalves (two shells), crinoids, the rare but occasional trilobyte, coral, bryzoa, and a wide assortment of creatures that lived in water--seawater, not fresh water.

Crinoid segments, pictured with a bivalve.

Bivalve

Lobster?  Crab?  I have no clue, but the color is gorgeous!

It's amazing, the tiny things that have been preserved.

Little treasures

Even smaller, are these fusulinid fossils.  There are certainly fossils smaller than these, but ones that can be seen with the naked eye are easier to share on a blog than foraminifera, for example.

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When I studied geology, when I fell in love with it, it was under the tutelage of Dr. David Harwood, who now heads the ANDRILL project (official link to ANDRILL).  He is a wonderful teacher, very hands-on, very eager to teach.  Jeremy turned on the TV a couple of weeks ago and NOVA was on PBS.  Imagine my surprise when the first person I saw was Dr. Harwood, detailing the study of cores taken from the seabeds of Antarctica.  In fact, the word Eustatic popped into my head immediately, as it was a word that he used often when teaching.  I smiled when I realized that he has finally established an international group to study this phenomenon.  If you are interested, you may read further HERE, an article that Dr. Harwood recommended to me.

Oddly Sentimental

Every morning that school is in session, our family has the same routine: the kids get up, get breakfast, get dressed, and with a lot of prodding and pushing, get out the door by 8:00 with Jeremy who takes them to school and then heads for work.

This morning, I stood at our front window holding Maria, which I often do as half of my family is leaving.  Then I became oddly sentimental.  I noticed Jeremy's profile as he pulled out of the driveway and onto the street--I really noticed it.  He sits the same way now as he did fourteen years ago when he began picking me up for dates.  He sits the same way now as he did ten years ago as the tireless fiance who picked me up for work--an extra half hour each way every day without complaining--and dropped me off afterward, for six months in a Nebraska winter when I had no car. 

There was my boyfriend pulling out of my driveway with my two oldest children in the back seat.  There sat the hot guy, albeit fifteen years older, that I fell in love with back in college.  I remembered sitting at front windows waiting for him to arrive.  I remembered the excitement that I felt when I heard or saw his car coming down the street all those years ago.  Right then, standing at the window, my heart skipped a beat.  I was transported back to a time when we were pretty carefree with very little responsibility and we felt new to each other.

It's easy to forget that time now, as we are now spouses working to raise a family, pay a mortgage, and put food on the table.  It's easy to forget that time of infatuation when the dishes need to be done, the trash needs to be taken out, and Maria has soiled her diaper.  I still get excited when I see his car come up the street or--more likely--hear the garage door opening.  It's for different reasons, now.  Not only am I eager to greet my spouse, my best friend, my rock, but I feel relief.  I am relieved that he is home safe, and I am relieved that he is here to help me. 

Whatever the reason, I am grateful for that little spark this morning that reminded me who my husband is and what he used to be: a playful boyfriend who wants the best for me.  Tonight as I sit writing this, I await his homecoming.  I'm eager to see him, and my heart just skipped a beat thinking about it.  Isn't marriage wonderful!

Knights in Shining Armor and Cardboard Castles

I was Supermom yesterday ... a title I'm not often willing to bestow upon myself.  Jeremy worked late, and so to keep the boys and myself busy, we began to construct cardboard castles for their newly acquired knights, horses, dragons, and other medieval creatures.

We constructed castles that would make my Grandpa--a master carpenter--proud!  (Yes, Grandpa?)  Now he works with "real" materials like wood, wood glue, staples, nails, and saws.  But I had a glue gun, packing tape, Target boxes, shoe boxes, toothpicks, ribbon, felt, and string.  We made the best of it.  I think I used 3/4 of my hot glue supply, clogged my glue gun 302 times from overuse, and went through a roll and a half of packing tape.  Here are the results....

This is a fairy castle for the girls, who received fairies and elves for Christmas, rather than medieval creatures.

This is Noah's castle, complete with drawbridge.  I also hemmed a piece of blue fabric on which he can set his castle to make it seem like a moat.  I intend to spray paint the boys' castles sometime soon, if they hold up for a little while.

I cut ribbon to make flags for the boys' castles.  I hot glued them to toothpicks which they can stick into the cardboard of their castles.  I also glued foam on a couple of places, hoping that they'd also use those little spots for flags.

Noah's knight defends his castle.

I also made banners which have a toothpick glued to the back, but only at the ends of the toothpick so that it can be hooked over something (two toothpicks glued to the castle, in this case).

Rather than make flags for the girls, I made banners out of ribbon.  I glued a toothpick straight down the length of the ribbon, but only glued the top half of the toothpick.  They can insert the banners into cut-up straws which I glued onto the edges of their castle.

I glued ribbon around their windows and glued long felt "curtains" on the insides of the windows.

At the top of their castle are two cubes--they said they're bedrooms--with windows.

Elf and Fairy horses do not smell like regular horses (and probably do not poop at all) so can be stabled in the lower part of the castle.  I'm sitting here chuckling.

This is the inside of the girls' castle.  See the horses peeking out of their stalls on the lower left?

Add caption

This is Noah's castle, from the side.

This is Isaiah's castle with the drawbridge up and his horse apparently stranded in the moat of our green carpet.

The girls couldn't stick toothpicks in their castle, so I cut straws and glued them to the top of the castle.  Now they can rest the toothpicks of their banners in the holders.

Isaiah has foam peanuts glued to the front of his castle into which he can stick his flags.

I glued foam onto the inside of Noah's castle, but the cutting and gluing of this proved to be very messy.

This is the back of Noah's castle.

Need Advice!

I sent this note to some of my closest girlfriends this morning.  Please read through it and see if you have anything to offer.  If you are my mother-in-law, you can just talk to me on the phone because I'm about to call you anyway.  ;)
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Ladies, I need a little mothering advice.  Noah (6 years old, kindergarten) TALKS, TALKS, TALKS, TALKS, TALKS all day long at me.  I timed it this morning, starting at 8:00, and it was--quite literally--no more than 45 seconds between "Mom, mom...." He needs to show me this, he needs to tell me that, he needs to ask me this, he wants to know that.  None of my other kids are like this.  It seems that no matter what time of day, no matter what I'm doing, he's got to pester me with questions and talks, I think, to hear himself talk, but it's always directed at me.  Nothing I've tried will calm the urgency that he seems to feel.  If I'm on the phone, if I'm in the bathroom, if I'm laying down during quiet time, it doesn't matter what I'm doing or what he's doing or supposed to be doing, he's pestering me.  He got a behavior report from school last week!   Mrs. H says that he often has to move a stick or lose a link for talking.  Often, he'll have to move a stick or lose a link again, because the first time didn't seem to deter him.

I don't know what to do! 

Even if I hold my hand up as a stop sign, hold a finger up as a "wait" sign, or tell him to leave me alone (I'm in the bathroom), even if I ignore him, he'll continue to ask, repeat himself, etc.  He interrupts (or attempts to interrupt) me anytime I'm working with his sisters or brother or speaking with Jeremy.  He has no concept of conversation etiquette, even though we've explained this to him ad nauseum. 

I need to train him to control himself, but I don't know how.  I'm at a loss.

I'm open to all suggestions!  He gets plenty of attention, plenty of time from Jeremy and me, so I'm not worried about that part of it. 

Help!

Thank you!

Aubrey

Gratuitous Cute Baby Pictures 2

Maria collapses on the floor after an exhausting Sunday Mass.

This is her funny face.  I LOVE it!

She's getting so big!

The kids called this Maria's Ball Bath.

Maria laughs at Daddy (complete with red-eye, which I failed to remove).

So long, toothless-grin days!  She's got her two bottom teeth in and set the record for the latest Laughing Child to teethe.