bflynn

My village

On Tuesday, my husband and I conscripted my brother into childcare and went to donate blood at the annual memorial blood drive for Vicky Graham. Vicky died of cancer a year or two after we joined the church. The blood drive is an especially appropriate way of remembering her, because during her fight infusions of platelets were one of the things that helped her feel better and get stronger. Vicky’s dad Whitey was standing at the entrance to the drive when we pulled up. We chatted, he signed us in and gave us stickers and little squeezy-balls. He thanked us for remembering Vicky.

As I was drinking my post-donation beverage, Whitey waved goodbye and said that his lovely wife was there to pick him up and he’d see us later.

Thursday night, when I came downstairs from putting Thane to bed, I saw my husband standing stricken with a phone to his ear. Whitey died Thursday afternoon from a massive heart attack.

When I think of Whitey’s dying, I think of work. There are Christians — I am one — who tend towards an intellectual approach to their faith. I think theology and Biblical study. Whitey was a Christian whose faith was done with his hands. He spearheaded the church’s ministry with the Dwelling Place, serving a meal to the hungry. Several times a year he cooked a meal for the church — Easter Breakfast, Fall luncheon. He was behind “Soup”er Bowl Sunday, and the Blankets and Tools drive. He was the lone guy on Deacons. He served with me on the Hospitality Committee. In my church bag, I noticed an envelope from him, my name scrawled on it. It was one of many projects we were working on together. He was a man who did things in accordance with what he believed.

He was also a father, many times over. He and Jean had three children: Vickie, Alex and Andrew. He and Jean had over 200 children. They were, are, foster parents. One of the last things he told me about was Alex and Andrew making foster-child Daryll laugh — Daryll is about Thane’s age. Whitey and Jean offered short term and long term homes to children in dire circumstances. They prayed every year for the children who “aged out” of the system and were sent alone into the world. Those children were always welcomed back at the Graham household.

When death comes long and slow, you have time to prepare. Gradually the tasks that person undertook are put aside in illness. I’ve seen that before. When death is a sudden visitor, you realize just how much you relied on a person. Whitey was supposed to give the sermon this Sunday while our pastor was on vacation. In an unusual fit of preparedness, he had already finished writing it, and it was read to us. It was about his faith, how his journey with Christ had progressed, and about what it had meant to him to be in community with us. It was an affirmation about how much he loved us. How strangely profound to hear from a man who had had every intention of delivering it himself.

Tomorrow, I will play “Lord of the Dance” at Whitey’s funeral. In September, I will find someone to prepare the Fellowship Lunch that was always his domain. In March, I will buy yellow roses and play “Lord of the Dance” for Vickie and Whitey. His example will remind me to be not only a thinking Christian and a feeling Christian, but an acting Christian.

Feeding a Thane

I’m finding it a fascinating experience to discover what is largely unchanged child-to-child, what is unique to each individual person, and just how much I’ve forgotten in three years. Food has to be one of those issues.

Does his face look different to you? I swear it's changed in the last week.

Breastfeeding I remembered thinking about. One of the things I dislike about nursing is just how much attention I find myself compelled to pay to it. I suspect this has a lot to do with me and my personality. My brother was commenting the other day just how much time I spend WORRYING about things and planning for things. It’s true — I hardly even notice because I’ve always been like that. But I notice with breastfeeding. I constantly wonder if I’m making enough milk to satisfy, how long it’s been since I last nursed, whether I’ve gone too long and am risking my supply blah blah blah. I think about it all the time. It’s exhausting. I take action on it all the time, too. I am still pumping at work twice a day, almost 6 months after my return.

Well, I’ve set myself a deadline. We’re headed out to Washington in the first week of August, at which point we’ll dump our children onto my parents and decamp. Or rather, camp. I’m planning on backpacking. I don’t see a great way to bring out enough frozen breast milk to provide for Thane while I’m there. And I don’t see a good way to preserve breastmilk while I’m backpacking the West Side of Mt. Rainier. So my plan is this: get Thane sufficiently accustomed to formula so that he can be on that while I’m gone. Bring my breast pump so I don’t totally shut off my supply, but stop worrying about it constantly. And then when I get back, I’m done pumping during the day and Thane can have formula at daycare. We’ll continue nursing when we’re in proximity for as long as it continues working. If this spikes nursing totally, so be it.

Of course, this matters waaaay less than it used to because Thane is getting so much more food from food. What I had forgotten about this stage was how unbelievably messy it is. Cheerios are all well and good, if a cross between a nutritional meal and a projectile weapon. Blueberries are beloved, but risky (nothing stains like blueberry!) But dear me, when the baby food comes out! First of all, Thane objects to not having control of all objects in his proximity. This is true of glasses, necklaces (I haven’t worn a necklace in about two months), noses, toys and spoons. So especially before he’s gotten his first bite, he’ll do a very good impression of an anti-spoon-aircraft battery. Usually he manages to at least hit away the spoon, which dislodges some food, which he promptly grabs with his hand. Then he rubs his eye.

“Ow! Mom! Someone put something in my eye! It hurts!” further evidence, if any was needed, that 8 month olds are not geniuses.

Once I sneak in that first bite (often while he’s protesting the indignity of not being allowed his own spoon), he’ll either decide he loves the food and open up (I always feel like a mommy bird popping worms in my baby’s mouth), or close his mouth tight in protest. Neither one really stops the questing hands.

The result is absolute chaos. He’s usually covered in food. His eyes are covered in food. His tray is covered in food. I’m covered in food (he has this charming habit of blowing raspberries). The floor is covered in food. The sides of the high chair are covered in food. And he’s hitting the tray with a stolen spoon, like some Victorian food protester.

Yeah, I think our babyfood days are limited. Time to start doing more finger foods.

Wishing I were updating

This hardly ever happens to me. I usually have a little cache of things I want to say or to talk about. But today I keep thinking about it and … nothing. So I thought I’d open the floor. What would you like me to talk about? Is there a part of my life you’d like me to expound upon? Are you totally sick of “cute things my kids have done recently” or is that a well that never runs dry? Comment and let me know!

Sing to the Lord a new song

My husband and I started attending Burlington Presbyterian Church the Sunday after we got back from our honeymoon, back in 2000. We were members by that winter, and I think my husband got conscripted to session, er, nominated to the high honor of monthly meetings within a year. (I ended up serving on Deacons.) Since then, we’ve gone pretty much every Sunday that we weren’t travelling, with a very few sleeping-in exceptions. The only other church we ever go to is the church I grew up in, when we visit my parents.

I love my church. I love the people. I love the pastor. I’ve been to the baptism of most of the cute kids on the front steps during Word for Children. Coffee hour ranges between good and excellent on a consistent basis.

But this last weekend, my brother was preaching at the church he’s interning at: Fourth Presbyterian in Dorchester. So we upended our familiar Sunday routine and took 93 south through the city to watch him.

What an interesting experience. I hadn’t realized how used I was to the way we do things. For example, the order of worship was different. They do all their announcements and prayers and concerns in the beginning. I actually really liked that — once the worship part started it was all worship. The music was great — they did interstices between parts of the service, and even played quietly during some of the prayers and readings. They did a fantastic job of integrating their children into their service. And the preacher was great too. (Heh.)

I also really liked the feeling of connectedness. One of the big reasons to be Presbyterian, instead of something else, is that we are tied through a connection and community to each other. Fourth and Burlington belong to the same Presbytery. I’d met several of the people at previous Presbytery meetings — in fact our September meeting will be held there. I felt a bit like an ambassador between two distant colonies of the same home country. It was all familiar but distinctly different, as well. And I felt just a touch of that church universal to which we aspire.

I love my church dearly. I have no desire to worship somewhere else week in and week out. But this makes me wonder if it might not be a blessing to me and to my service to BPC to periodically see how it’s done other places, and come back with new ideas and energy. I also think it is a joy to create connections between the communities. Matthew’s sermon was on the strength that we gain from working together, instead of alone. He’s right. That goes for churches as well as people.

Thane at 8 months

This is the face of a kid who skipped his nap and is being carted around on his moms back — This is the face of a kid who skipped his nap and is being carted around on his mom's back

Sunday in church, as we were singing the final hymn, my husband started grinning. Given that he and I act like a pair of teenagers half the time we’re in church, I figured he just thought of something funny and gave him the quizzical eyebrow-raise. During the ending anthem-thingy he explained. “I just suddenly thought of Thane’s smile, and the very memory of it makes me smile”*

It’s true. My son’s smile is so exuberant and infectious that the very memory of greeting him in the morning can make you grin. All milestones aside, this is what is important about Thane.

But milestones there are! This was the month my son discovered mobility. He started crawling at Grandma’s house over Memorial Day weekend. By now, he’s lightening fast. He likes to do loops around the center island of our home. He’s eel-like — strong, squirmy and often slimy — when it comes to nursing or changing diapers. It is nearly impossible to put clothes on the child be cause he is GO GO MOVE MOVE! He seems to have a special affinity for books and shoes. He loves to play with them and put them in his mouth and generally check them out. He’s persistent. If he’s removed from an inappropriate object, he will try repeatedly to return to it.

His legs are incredibly strong. He’s pulling up to standing often, although usually on low objects. It’s more like pushing up to standing, since he rarely pulls UP, but rather pushes down to get on his feet. Yesterday, he stood for about a minute while only holding on to the collar of my shirt. It will be interesting to see if he’s satisfied with crawling, or if he decides to add walking to his repertoire by the 9 month update.

His baby babble has gotten delightful. Always a Daddy’s Boy, he spent the entire morning saying “Dadadadad”. He makes a vast array of sounds, from a delighted squeaky laugh to an insistent bird-like squawk to a truly delightful content-sound that beggars description. He is really clapping these days, which is lots of fun. Knocking down a tower of blocks is a never-ending joy and delight.

His deep affection for overhead fans remains undimmed.

One of the real issues we’ve had with him since we started solid foods half his lifetime ago has been constipation. He’ll try and try and become very unhappy because it’s not working. I cut down his solids so he was eating almost entirely fruit. He’s still breast-fed. But it didn’t work. Finally I called his doctor (shoulda done that earlier) to explain that the all-prunes, all-the-time diet wasn’t working, and was told to give him prune juice. I’ve never given my infants juice because, well, they didn’t need it and it just represented empty calories (I thought). But my! What a difference 2 oz a night of prune juice has made! He has stealth poops now, that we only discover to our chagrin later! This is infinitely preferable. So there’s my advice to you all, in case you ever find yourself in similar straits.

This is the incredibly messy state with food. He desires mastery over the babyfood spoon. He looooooooves Cheerios, but his method of eating them resembles artillery as much as fine dining. He can thwart the craftiest parent with a well-aimed swipe at a spoon, and if that fails, he’s not above blowing green-bean-bubbles. I had blocked this stage from my memory with Grey. It’s MESSY, but the only way to teach him to eat real food is to give him real food to eat and suffer the consequences.

Thane is becoming a pickier sleeper. He used to just go down very easily. But at Grandma’s at the beginning of the month, he really didn’t like to go to sleep in his Pack and Play. And we discovered at camping, to our chagrin, our Pack and Play was just as despised as hers. Lately he’s been fussing more about going to sleep, even when visibly tired. I suppose it is some compensation that he will sometimes now sleep between 10:30 (pre-my-bedtime feeding) and about 6 am. He’ll usually go back to sleep after the 6 am feeding.

Grey and Thane make awesome brothers. There was this wonderful, fantastic moment while we were camping when we were all hanging out in our tent before bedtime. Grey had a very interesting glowstick that Thane wanted to check out (see also: eat). Grey would run to one side of the tent and Thane would chase after him. Round and round they went, laughing and giggling, while their father and I watched with joy. Grey’s started to get a little annoyed with some things Thane does — like playing with a toy Grey wants or making loud noises in the car. But normal, happy siblings get annoyed with each other. Grey also pays a lot of attention to his brother. He’ll often try to cheer him up when he’s sad. He’ll ask where Thane is when he’s not currently visible. He’ll give him toys (after checking first!) if Thane seems fussy. Grey has a very strong intuition for knowing what’s bugging his brother.

Thane’s personality has started to strongly express itself. This can be difficult because it is hard to consider another person’s opinions and preferences — especially when those preferences are strongly pro-eating-shoelaces. But it’s also one of the great delights of parenthood, to watch your children become the people they are. I love every minute of being Thane’s mother.

*All husband-quotes approximate. He hates it when I misquote him, but I can never remember EXACTLY what he said.

A mother of boys

I had an awesome weekend. It started Thursday night — we took Friday off. We stayed up late late late making lists and going shopping and packing stuff into the car for our first camping trip with the boys.

I love camping. I’ve loved camping for as long as I remember. I love exploring, and the fire. I love the sound of a zipper in the morning. I love pine needles in my breakfast and clear morning sunlight on the mountains. However, here in New England I haven’t known WHERE to go camping, we haven’t had all the gear we needed out here, and since Grey was born I’ve been too chicken to bring him out. Life is too short to not do things you love because you’re chicken, so I put a trip on the calendar this spring.

We went to White Lake State Park in New Hampshire. It was an excellent combination of facilities (nice bathrooms, a playground, a great beach with a lifeguard, an onsite canteen, etc).

On Friday morning, when the boys woke up at 6 am, we shoveled ourselves into the car and headed North. It was a beautiful drive, on one of the first warm days of the summer. We stopped at the Miss Wakefield Diner for second breakfasts, and were still at the campground by like 10 am.

We had a ball. I’d bought a new tent, which turned out to be absolutely enormous. It was more than big enough for a Pack-and-play, two grownups, and a cuddly three year old. The lake was really quite warm for this early in the spring. Grey had a wonderful time swimming. I got floaters for both boys, and Thane seemed to really enjoy swimming too. After we were done with water play, there was sand to be dug into. Naps didn’t really happen, sadly, so our nature walk around the lake was a little more contentious than I’d have hoped. (Grey was tired. Adam and I were TIRED. Thane was sleeping on my back.)

That night we had a great campfire (bragging alert: I got the fire started with one piece of newspaper, with the same match I used to light the mosquito lantern). We roasted hot dogs and made s’mores. We sat and stared at the coals of the fire. It was everything a night in the woods should be.

Around midnight the rain started. This would usually be a sign that camping was about to stop being fun, but we’d put away pretty much all of our gear before retiring, we’d put a tarp over the tent, and the tent proved to be far more water-tight than our old tents were. So the several hours of rain ended up being pretty much a non-entity.

To sum up: camping was really really fun and I want to go again SOON!

But we had to get back home because Grey’s final dance recital was 5 pm on Friday. Grey has been going to dance classes all year. He’s been good about going, although he doesn’t talk about it much. I think he did it and was ok with it, but definitely didn’t love it. The recital kept getting more and more complex. We had to pony up $55 in OCTOBER for a costume that turned out to be a very crappy, Halloween-style tuxedo. There was the Sunday morning lineup to buy tickets to the rehearsal. The tickets were pricey ($20), and they said we’d need to buy them even for Grey if we wanted him to watch any of the recital. Group pictures were $15. A dvd of the performance was $45. They sold bouquets, including bouquets of lollipops which made Grey feel like dancing = entitled to sweets. Then there was a dress rehearsal at 4 pm on a Wednesday, which required massive coordination to make happen. The upside was that Grey did a great job. He looked really cute. He worked hard and paid attention. I’m sure he learned some important things in the classes. But he didn’t love it. Thank heavens. I hated the whole circumstances of the recital, and I’m relieved never to be doing THAT again.

Not that he wasnt adorable — Not that he wasn't adorable

I loved camping. I didn’t love the dance class. Perhaps it’s just as well I’m a mother of boys!

Choices

I could write posts, or I could upload and edit pictures. I chose the latter. I regret nothing.

The link to Picasa. The captions have made this infinitely more fun.

24 hours later one of these people was wearing a tux

A jumble of me

I just finished writing a note to a friend from college — a friend I met during Freshman orientation. He’s one of the few people I met at college before I met the man I would marry. We used to take long night walks around Harkness Green and talk about where we had come from, where we thought we were going (we were both wrong) and what a big world it was.

The note, much belated, is really to his daughter. In it I speak for my sons. I don’t think those 18 year olds watching the Hale-Bopp comet on Harkness Green could even conceive of such a thing.

When I picked Thane up from nursery on Sunday, I was greeted with the words “You’re in deep trouble”. He’s not 8 months old yet. He’s pulling up to standing and crawling FAST. Let the childproofing be in earnest!

On Saturday I got to go to a graduation party for two kids I’d taught Sunday School/confirmation/youth group to. It was an awesome party, and a wonderful time to hang out with people I really like, talking about our shared experiences and future hopes. Also, other people played with my sons and seemed to enjoy themselves.

Here are some pictures

We’re starting to use a new technology – Flex – at work. Knowing I learn best when I (duh) concentrate on learning, I scheduled a training class for myself. I asked if anyone wanted to come. The entire technical team — including DBAs — did. So we are having a three day onsite training course starting tomorrow. I keep wondering how I managed to pull this off. But I did. So I will be BUSY in the heart of this week. That’s a polite way of saying, “No I haven’t fallen on the face of the Earth but you probably won’t be hearing from me.” And when next you do, I’ll be a “Flexpert”.

And then I took Friday off. We’re going camping. Yes, in a tent. Yes, overnight. Yes, with Grey and Thane.

I CAN’T WAIT. I love camping.

I think that’s the important stuff!

Guilt and dental hygiene

In most aspects of my life, I feel like a reasonably adept human being. But when it comes to dentists and dental hygiene, well, I don’t think I’ve ever emerged from a dentists office without feeling like a complete failure. I figured that this was limited to me, and that my sons would escape the scourge of dental-insufficiency. (Well, when I thought about it at all.)

Then we took Grey to the dentist, about a year ago. They were “concerned”. And a few months back, it went from “let’s keep an eye on that” to “he needs fillings – 8 of them”.

The kid only has like 20 teeth, and 8 of them have cavities? Given that his teeth are my responsibility, I once again feel like a failure. I’m pretty sure it’s from the milk he took to bed with him for the year between 1 and 2. We’ve been brushing his teeth since he turned 2, but the damage must’ve been done by then.

He got his first filling today. He did great. He also got his X-rays and did fine. He got a Bakugon as a reward. (What? You don’t know about Bakugan? They’re cool. They’re little balls — perfect choking hazards — that you throw on the ground and then they explode into robots. They’re “collectible”.)

The point of this isn’t really cavities and my bad parenting. It’s Thane. Having a second child, you find you remember much less about each stage than you think you might. It feels like you’re doing it for the first time all over again, with momentary flashback now and again to illumine a particular issue. I had forgotten how hard it was to get Grey to bed at the same time. We had elaborate rituals that included ALWAYS something to drink, music on the cd player, the mobile on, sneaking out, etc. They didn’t usually work. Even in the middle of the night it was hard to get him back to sleep.

Thane though? Thane goes to sleep easily. I change his diaper. I read him two stories. I sing to him. I pray for him. I put him in his crib and turn on the mobile because it seems like the thing to do. I close the door. I do not hear from him until I feed him right before bed. He pretty much ALWAYS goes right to sleep. I think I’ve gotten back out of bed once? Twice? in the middle of the night after he failed to go back to sleep.

Children are so different.

Even if they don’t look different.