7 Quick Takes -- Vol. 22

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Quotes of the Week 
D: Maybe when you grow up, Annie, you’ll be a famous scientist.
A: NO. Famous scientist BABY.

Annie, singing softly to her baby doll:
Hush hush baybee, no cwy baybee.

Quizzing Walter (Bobay) on the Bible story of Jesus & the little children:
M: And what did the disciples say?
W: Oh, hi Bobay!
M: okkkkkkk...and what did Jesus say?
W: Hi Bobay too!

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Sunday was Mother’s Day. The day was a bit of a difficult one, as HeWhoShallNotBeNamed decided that it would be a really great idea to throw tantrums all day. And we were in the final throws of David’s latest round of publication craziness, meaning that us adults were both exhausted. But of course I still had a lovely time – they’d made me the most wonderful Mother’s Day card (from an upcycled Christmas card and featuring “the white ashes of love” and we went for an amazing sushi lunch at this all you can eat place that my brother recommended. Lunch was fantastic, both with the food, the happy babies, and the dining experience of incredibly surly wait-staff who seemed to really resent having to serve us all we could eat! Annie ate 1.5 bowls of udon while I enjoyed sharing a plate with Walter. Trying to feed a toddler with chopsticks was an hilarious experience – I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time.

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Speaking of laughing, I’ve been listening to the “Fountains of Carrots” podcast at work and it is amazing. I laugh, I cry, I probably appear insane to all those around me... These ladies share my taste in books, art, and faith. I can’t get enough! This recent podcast on "The Art of Making Do" is one of my absolute favourites. It was so encouraging listening to another working mum speak about parenting & life & faith. All this great common sense came through the conversation, like how we do what’s best for OUR families, even if that doesn’t look like what’s best for someone else’s family. It made my heart happy to hear the acknowledgement that sometimes both parents have to work because those are the cards life dealt them, not because they should just be better at budgeting or are sacrificing their family on an altar of money. Most of the other young mum’s I know are able to stay at home, so it can get a bit lonely feeling at times because my days are so different.

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Book of the Week This week I finished reading Kipling’s Indian Tales. I liked about 50% of the stories. The good ones were really good, but the rest of the book was a bit hard to follow or just “meh”. David agreed, so now I know I’m not just missing something.

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My cousin Tara just had a darling baby girl. I made her this:

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A month ago, we made a good dent in the stock at Sikora – they had an amazing sale for Record Store Day. We’ve been listening to one album of beautiful music each night since then. It’s been a treat! Alas, we’ve now exhausted all of our purchases aside from some big boxed opera sets. Good thing a stack of Stompin’ Tom & Chad Mitchell just arrived yesterday.

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Album of the Week For Mother’s Day the gang gave me a sealed copy of the Mitchell Trio’s 1963 album “The Best of the Chad Mitchell Trio”. It was very exciting getting a sealed LP of one of my favourite North American folk groups! The album is mostly humorous songs with a few traditional folk & gospel songs added for good measure. I really liked comparing the recordings on this album to others of the same songs. I felt that the album went at a slower pace and that the music was a little less theatrical than some of their later works. We had a really great time listening through the album once the kids went to sleep. This is one of my favourites: 

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Our Little Liturgical Year -- Part I

One thing that I really enjoy about these early years of being a mum is building our family traditions. There is such a wealth to draw on between childhood memories, the different cultures we’ve been exposed to, and our faith traditions.

The liturgical year, as we practice it as Catholics, fits with the rhythm of the seasons. Advent, that great period of longing, waiting, & preparation comes in those last few weeks of winter when the nights are darkest, and at Christmas we welcome the infant Christ, light of the world, while we notice the slight lightening of the evenings after the Winter Solstice. Easter falls with the first rush of spring, especially here, and the little buds sprouting on empty branches or the green shoots pushing up amongst the brown sludge of winter’s remains provide the perfect setting to meditate on death, life, & rebirth. Aside from these four longish periods in our year there are all the little feasts & solemnities to celebrate, a way weaving our family life into the greater life of the Church. This year, for example, I am going to find a way for us to start marking the Feast of St Anthony, our family’s patron saint.

Of course, being a busy mum of two toddlers it is necessary to retain some reality & prudence when marking out our feasts & fasts. The children are keen to join in with activities, but they have little attention spans & very big propensities for making messes & distractions. There is always a lot that I can accomplish in my imagination, but I’ve found that a less-is-more approach works the best right now. There will always be time to build on our activities as they grow. I know that these are just quick & little ideas, but I’ve found that even a small change in routine is enough to inspire toddlers with excitement & interest. It’s the first step to teaching them to let their faith alter how they live their lives, and it gives us a really fun way to interact as a family.

The Smallest Scale:

Every Sunday is for feasting! I’ve noticed that the Catholic world really loves the post-Mass doughnut, and there is usually no exception in this house (or at least the post-Mass banana muffin for the smallest members of the family). The children aren’t yet involved in dinner too much, because the things I make aren’t high on the toddler approval list, but I do try to shake up their regular eating routine as well & do something fun when I can. David & I usually indulge in some form of Sunday Roast (a great British tradition that I’ve been happy to bring back to Canada—the leftovers are repurposed into another meal or two for following weeks) and I’ve been documenting this on Instragram under #wias (What I Ate Sunday).

The opposite of Sunday, every Friday is for penance as we mark the weekday of Christ’s crucifixion & death. Like the majority of our fellow Catholics, we abstain from meat on this day. We are out in the world enough that it often does feel like a sacrifice – my office’s cafeteria always seems to smell like bacon all day on Friday and there are enough special events involving food on Fridays that it is not always the easy road to take. But I like doing something that allows us to live our faith without having to make a big showy deal of it -- and it certainly has prompted a few conversations with people who know that we regularly are happy to be carnivores. I also think it’s important as a reminder of how lucky we are to be able to choose not to eat meat, rather than having that choice thrust upon us by poverty. Of course, Friday is also our family fun night, so we’ve tried to find a way to incorporate that in—most Fridays we make pizza from scratch. It’s something fun we can do together and which can be easily tweaked to include meat for some but not all when non-Catholic friends & family join us for the evening.

Advent:

The Catholic world has a gamut of different things to do to celebrate Advent at home. It’s a season of repentance & preparation, that time of great longing when we realise how much we need salvation & wait to welcome Christ at Christmas. In our house:

• David is allowed to start playing Christmas music on the First Sunday of Advent, but we don’t put any decorations up until Gaudete Sunday (the third Sunday of Advent)

• This year we celebrated the Feast of St Nicholas with chocolate Santas & Christmas pajamas. The kids put their shoes on the window for St Nicholas to fill. We have a little talk about who St Nicholas is and about how he is going to bring presents to help us celebrate Jesus’ birthday:

Sneaking into their room to put presents on the windowsill while they slept was no small feat!

• We have been transient for so long that investing in an advent wreath hasn’t seemed prudent. Thus a family tradition was born – each year we make our advent wreath. Ideally we forage on a nature walk for winter greenery with which to weave it, but this year the pickings seemed a bit sparse (although next year I know where to harvest my holly!) so we hit up the dollar store. We aren’t always great with remembering to light the candles, since toddlers + fire are not the best combination and it can be difficult to find a good place to keep the wreath lit, but the kids are always excited to be involved in the project and really love lighting the candles & saying the prayers.

"Ducks", bows, and bells -- Can you tell that toddlers picked these decorations?

We can enjoy fire when Baby Annie's contained. Walter kept telling me that it was hot. 

• chocolate filled Advent Calendars to help us count the days until Baby Jesus’ birthday party.

7 Quick Takes - Volume 18 - The Craft Version

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A couple of week’s ago I said “watch this space” for some craftyness. I’ve surpassed my expectations & managed to finish a little embroidery project – bibs for a friend’s new baby. I sketched the designs myself & and then embroidered them. I’m pretty pleased with the result, especially as I needed to keep them relatively simple so that there would be a hope of them getting done!

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I know I already wrote about how Emma (and Rob) joined us for Thanksgiving, but what I didn’t mention is that Emma has yarn-talents and makes beautiful things for babies, including my babies. Last year she made Walter a beautiful chalice lace blanket (now known as ‘blankey’ and often found wrapped over his head during awake times or snuggled up at his chin during sleep times) and this year she had an adorable bunny for Emily.

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Being the new baby on the block, Emily has been the recipient of many lovely handmade gifts. My friend Nicole quilted her a beautiful pillow, which looks quite darling in the cradle and has already come in useful as Little Miss prefers to recline against pillows when awake, thank you very much:

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And my mother sweetly obliged to knit Emily some shoes for her Baptism outfit, since I didn’t have the time or resources to make them myself. I’m pretty sure the buttons are leftovers from an outfit I had when I was a baby:

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Speaking of mum, she has the gorgeous autumn-yellow wool that is super soft and cozy warm and makes great baby sweaters. She made this awesome hooded sweater for Walter:

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And since I have Irish Twins, I felt no compunction in requesting a sweater for Emily as well so that they could be matchy-matchy:

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And finally, a family friend from back home also got in on the handmade spoiling and has done these beautiful cross stitch quilts for the babes:

Walter's

Emilys

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

7 Quick Takes (Vol. 4)

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I missed doing a quick takes last week because it was my last week in Canada and I was busy packing up. I also had a nasty case of the flu, and Walter had a slightly-less-nasty case of the flu (which took forever to clear up), and it was a bit of rough going for a few days. We both are recovered, but this virus is so contagious that David managed to catch it from us over a week-and-a-half from when we had it. I am so tired of being sick (so far it's been fairly steady for either Walter or I to be sick for the past 6 weeks) and I'm hoping this is the end of it for awhile.

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It took us 22 hours to get from Vancouver to Cambridge and this time around I realised what it is that I hate so much about travel -- it's the sheer humiliation & degradation levied towards the innocent traveler by those in positions of authority. Think of how many bullies it attracts! This time around there was the utterly horrible US Immigration Officer Lady who accused me of committing fraud and didn't want to believe that I actually had the right to travel with my son to take him back to his father. I know that you're supposed to get a letter of consent to travel without one parent, but circumstance made this difficult (I couldn't get a signed letter from David by the time of our flight) and the guidance from the Government of Canada is that you need it to travel away from your country of residence -- we were traveling to our country of residence. It took a marriage certificate, birth certificates, and David's Cambridge admission letter to convince her that I wasn't abducting Walter. Following from this there were also the horrible stewardesses which American Airlines seems to hire (I don't know why they have such a hard time bringing water for a baby, but this is the second time that Walter's had to go without food because they couldn't be bothered to bring water after I asked for it...so I spent the bulk of our trip dehydrating myself so that I could save all my water for mixing his food), and there were the incompetents at Heathrow who couldn't manage to get anyone's strollers to the gate (we were lucky as our flight terminated there -- there were a couple of families who had to continue their journey without adequate transport around the airport for the children because the strollers were left dumped in the baggage collection area). Try lugging a 20lb infant and several carryons through a massive airport and see how awful you look/feel.

The funny thing about the above list of  grievances is that this was a relatively good journey! UK Immigration was awesome and gave me no trouble, our connections all worked out, and the taxi company sent us a huge van instead of the estate car I'd paid for, meaning we could ride to Cambridge in comfort. I'm really grateful for how smoothly everything worked out, but I think travel is just destined to be unpleasant...

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When I was born, the in-vogue craft seemed to be cross stitch, as I have a few cross stitched pictures celebrating my arrival. 29 years later and the trend seems to be quilting, as my little son has received four handmade quilts so far. Three of the quilts were made by friends or family (the fourth was purchased from a craft fair) so they are incredibly special to us, but I am almost jealous that he has more quilts than I do (although my one & only baby quilt was made by my Auntie Helen out of my mother's wedding dress). They are all very different and I love them all:

Bright Pinwheels made by my friend Nicole. Walter spent a lot of time on this when he was first born. Not only is it beautiful, but our whole family loves it as a reminder of the amazing, kind, and generous friends we've made in England.

Bedtime Bears -- it's a really large quilt so I'm looking forward to using it when he has a bigger bed.

My Auntie Helen made him this Canadian-themed one. The blue heart in the top-left corner is cut from one of my Grossmutter's dresses, and Walter's name & birthdate are embroidered around it. Needless to say it has a lot of sentimental value for everyone in my family.

The lovely quilty blanket our friend Alice just made for him. The colours are the same as the ones in the wedding quilt that my Aunt Helen made for my parents and it's just perfect for our growing boy.

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On with the picture theme, here is my favourite 3 Generation picture of Porter-Men:

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 It's currently snowing. In March. In Cambridge. Maybe this serves me right for not being overly sympathetic to all the Albertans complaining about their latest huge dump of snow, but in my experience on the prairies a March blizzard dump was nothing to be surprised about. The year it happened in late April was a giant pain, but March is still winter in that part of the world, regardless of what the calendar says. Don't hold me to this if we ever move back to central Canada!

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This morning on my walk in to Mass I realised that I could pretty much describe my life as "purgatory". For me this was a major breakthrough. It may not sound that great, but for the past year and a half I'd been more apt to describe my life as hell -- a seeming endless series of hard events, tough decisions, and disasters that in many ways kept getting worse and with no real end in sight. Now, although things are still really difficult and some days I wonder how I can keep going, it no longer feels like we're doomed to suffer forever. God is giving me grace right now to seek Him in these experiences and to use it as a way of strengthening my faith and my ability to relate to all sorts of people. Sure, I wish my life were quite easier, but the struggle no longer seems pointlessly overwhelming.

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 I'm late on my Quick Takes, as you may notice since it's now Sunday, not Friday. But I have a jet-lagged baby, a husband with the flu, and a huge amount of errands to run. The good thing about them being late is that I can finish off by mentioning just how awesome it was to return to our very own Fisher House for Mass this morning. We saw so many friends, friends who we could relate some of our most recent struggles to, friends who were instantly supportive. It was so nice. I can't really talk about a lot of our problems by blogging, because I don't want to commit certain things to writing (that blasted paper trail always comes back to haunt one, especially in the UK if the papers are to be believed) so it was nice to reconnect with friends. And this morning's experience wasn't the only chance meeting -- on Friday we bumped into a dear friend, unplanned, because we both happened to choose the same pub at the same time, and on Saturday another dear friend met up with us because she just happened to be in town over the weekend. It's been great.

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!