5/30/11

You Can Find My Etsy Store At...

Our monster difficulties peaked one night when my son demanded a dreamcatcher to calm his fears.

I suspect he got this idea from my mother, because although he is part Chippewa (no, don't look at me...), and we have had dreamcatchers in our house before, they've never played a substantial part in his bedroom decor.  However, Mom firmly believes in the power of suggestion (or superstition, whichever you prefer) to hinder nightmares.

That would have been fine, had he not demanded one at approximately 9 P.M., in a house devoid of dreamcatchers, seeing as how I had LITERALLY LIKE TWO WEEKS BEFORE gotten rid of two dreamcatchers I had made when I was a kid.  Had he been at the house where She Who Probably Suggested It resides, it wouldn't have been an issue, but my house can't double as an awesome museum of all things cultural, and the most Native American-related piece of art I have in my house is a clay pot.  That E made me.

But motherhood spawns creativity (along with insanity), so I set to making a dreamcatcher for my son.  With the plastic rim off of an oatmeal container.  And dental floss.  It was harder than I remembered it being when I was 10.  I resisted the urge to google instructions, however, and pressed on.  The results were slightly lopsided, but recognizable nevertheless.

And the monsters have stayed away from his room ever since.

5/20/11

"My mama says there aren't any zombies..."

We have officially moved into our new house, and consequently I am in a state of interior (and somewhat exterior) design frenzy.  Pictures quite likely to follow.

I was a bit worried before we moved in, because my son has never slept farther away from me than across a very small apartment, and our new house has a first-level master bedroom, with the other bedrooms upstairs.  For various reasons, my son will STILL get out of bed multiple times per night if we don't "check on him" every 10 minutes or so.  Now, granted, he usually falls asleep within 20 minutes of turning the lights off, but not always, which can be quite a battle.  And he sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night and comes to find us because he has nightmares or gets scared. 

He comes by his overactive imagination honestly, however. I'm the sort of person who still checks on my son before I leave in the morning just to make sure he's still there. And breathing (yes, I know SIDS doesn't apply to 8-year-olds.  He's not your son.).  I attempted to talk my husband into purchasing a baby monitor so I could hear it (and hopefully subsequently wake up...) if someone crawled through E's window and snatched him.  And I get anxious when he's playing at friends' houses, because I worry that he's left without telling anyone and he'll get stolen on the way home.  Luckily for me, I have a patient husband.  So all of us were prepared for some new nighttime worries. 

It started with the attic space.  In our new house, one walks past E's room down a hallway that leads to another bedroom, and at the beginning of this hallway is the first attic space, which is just a little closet under the roof in which we store all my seasonal decorating regalia.  The aforementioned bedroom has double doors in it that lead into the real attic space.  The first day in the house, before bedtime had even come up, E told me he was afraid to sleep upstairs, because he was scared that monsters were going to come of the attic.  Which is valid.  We discussed options to decrease the fear of said monsters, and luckily I happened to suggest chaining up the door handles.  He perked up like I'd just said Pikachu had come to town.  Thus followed a search for suitably thick chains, which were strung around the door handles in proper monster-deterring fashion.  And the first day passed, and the first night.

Well, then, the chains weren't enough.  We needed locks on the actual doors.  So my patient husband installed a lock on the attic door and no less than two locks on the crawlspace door (which, after all, is much closer to E's actual room, and therefore, monsters are more likely to emit from this entry rather than the one 20 feet down the hall).  This turned out to be a very good idea, because I discovered that when the windows in that bedroom-down-the-hall are open, a monster-like wind rushes through the room and throws open the attic door with a mighty bang.  I can just imagine how that would have gone over in the middle of the night.

A couple nights later, he refused to go upstairs by himself at night because he was positive that there was someone hiding behind the bathroom curtain.  Now this, I could not blame him for, because I am also plagued by this particular fear (thank you, college English teacher, for making me watch Psycho, you've scarred me for life).  My paranoia takes the form of tiptoeing into the bathroom and throwing back the shower curtain with some sort of weapon (hair dryer, slipper, etc) in my other hand.  It's worked for me so far. I am touched by the fact that my son apparently feels that I would be sufficient protection against someone creepy enough to get into our house and hide behind our shower curtain, especially since he thinks my mother is "too small" to protect him from tornados.  This fancy hasn't come up again, but I'm sure it won't be long...

The next time E's imagination was working overtime, he told D that GREMLINS, of all things, were going to crawl out of the air vent in his room and get him during the night.  I'm not sure how D handled this one, since I was on call and not available to stand gremlin watch, but the next morning there wasn't anything taped over the air vent and my child was un-gremlinized, so I'm fairly certain everything turned out ok.

Last night, I had placed E's First Communion rosaries on his bedside shelf (he sleeps in a bunkbed, so a table would have to be incredibly tall to be of any use), and when he crawled into bed, he asked me to say the rosary with him.  Thinking that it would help, after we said the rosary, I talked to him about Psalm 23 and the idea of being safe because God was with you, etc.  After turning out the lights, I checked on him a previously-agreed-upon amount of time later, and his face was pale and somewhat drawn.  To my query, he replied that he was scared.  "What's wrong?" I asked.  "What if I forget about God tonight and he sends gremlins out of my vent to get me?" 

I'm going to have to board up my entire upstairs, people.

5/6/11

Bookworm Delight

So a while ago, a friend of mine posted this on her facebook page in a note.  Apparently, the BBC believes most people will only have read 6 out of these 100 novels.  So you're supposed to edit the list to reflect which books you've read (bold) or partially read (italics).  You get the picture.  I went through the list when she first posted it, feeling bad about not having read that many of the books. And recently, I've been in a book dead phase, after finishing several excellent books and now waiting for their sequels or whatever to come out (several months from now...sad face...). So I thought it'd be a good time to read some classics, especially since I've been on a library kick ever since I decided we should probably start saving some money up for this little house we're pouring money in to. I just finished Du Maurier's "Rebecca" (which I liked a lot) and I'm in "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" now (which I'm not a fan of so far).  So here's the rest of the list!

 
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (yes, Mother, I know...)
7 Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (AK, I blame you for this one.  If you had given me a different book, I'd have read this one.)
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables

I realize, looking through this list, that most of the ones I have read, I read as a teenager.  And hence, don't remember them very well.  There are some, however, that I know I have no intention of ever reading again (Lord of the Flies, 1984, Great Gatsby, Great Expectations...Thank you, high school English, for ruining reading for a bunch of impressionable minds with some pretty terrible books, however thought-provoking and "deep" they may be).  And there are some that I have read over and over, and intend to keep reading (Dumas, C. S. Lewis, Anne of Green Gables, Roald Dahl, Sherlock Holmes, Tolkien, Tale of Two Cities, To Kill a Mockingbird).

Wish me luck.  "Tess" may defeat me.  Hardy is wordy.  And vague

5/5/11

I Guess It Makes Sense To Him

"Mom, when I grow up, I want to live between Hawaii and China."
"Oh? Why between Hawaii and China?"
"Because I like to hunt outside in the dark.  Wearing my ninja clothes.  Because it's fun to do that."
"What does that have to do with Hawaii? Or China?"
"Because there are trees there."
"There are?"
"And I want to be a ninja."

5/2/11

Definition

On May 1, 2011, my son made his First Communion.

We've been preparing for this day all year.  In addition to the regular religious education classes he takes, he also had several prep days, and D & I had what seemed like 20 (at least) parent meetings to discuss the various goings-on that would be happening on the big day.  We helped 70 kids make clothespin crucifixes and rainbows (yes, rainbows).  We carefully chose and trimmed a piece of the teddy bear quilt my mother had made, that E had inherited from me and my siblings, so that it could be incorporated into an altar cloth.  D & I semi-patiently sat through two pedantic videos aimed at explaining the Eucharist to 7-year-olds. I hand-hemmed the suit pants that were about 4 inches too long for my tiny boy and packed around a First Communion tie for an entire year (purchased when I was shopping for my niece's First Communion last year).  We sat through a 2-hour long live presentation of the Passover and Last Supper, complete with a pseudo-Seder meal, and braved the tastes of bitter herbs and saltwater.  We watched E pose for pictures in his suit and tie, and rehearsed the actual big day over and over again: "You hold your hands like this, the priest will say this, you will bow like this, you say 'amen'..." I felt impossibly giddy yesterday morning, could barely look at my son without wanting to overflow with joy and pride and love.

This is why we are Catholic.  This is a big deal.  Spelling bees, recitals, championship games, senior proms, none of them are as important as this.  My mother taught me that nothing comes before Mass, and at Mass, the pivotal point is the Eucharist.  And this was the first time my son would be fully involved.  How could that not be incredibly special?

We attend a very large church that had about 75% of the pews reserved for (and filled by) First Communicants' friends & family members on the big day.  Our particular contingent was made up of my parents, D's parents, E's father, stepmother and grandmother.

And my best friend, the Queen Bee. 

Last week, I asked her if she'd like to come, with minimum advance notice, even though my own family had known about this day for months.  Because I was missing my brother and sister, who weren't going to make it, although nothing other than impossible distances would have kept them away.  And she dropped everything and came.  Without hesitation, without question.  Without making excuses.

She hugged me as he walked down the aisle, exclaiming over how impossibly cute he was.  She sang our hymns and read our words.  She held our hands and greeted our neighbors with the sign of peace.  She patted my back as tears rolled down my face when he said "Amen" in front of the priest and accepted the Eucharist in his tiny hands.  She fetched pieces of cake and watched over belongings and was patient with the ridiculous chaos that accompanies any event in which I am involved.

She's not Catholic, what does she care about our rituals and beliefs?  She has her own life and job and had so many other things to do rather than sit in a strange building for an hour and a half for about 2 minutes of show time (when E walked down the aisle and when he actually made his First Communion).  She is not related to me or to my son.

But she came because the day was important to me and because she loves my son. 

And that's what family is.
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