New School Year Begins

This is an exciting time of year at St. Vlad's. The new students have arrived and been helped to move in. We have an incoming class this year that doesn't follow the typical pattern of recent years because it contains more single seminarians than married (exactly twice as many, as far as I can tell). The returning students are all abuzz with changes to curriculum and professors and such. For the first time, I will be taking advantage of the opportunity that spouses have to audit classes free of charge here by taking Kate Behr's Theology and Children's Literature course. It feels like a natural extension of my library science degree and my love of children's literature. I just hope I can keep up with the readings!

We just had a meeting of the women's group on campus, (which is comprised of wives of students, faculty, and residents, and women students) during which we planned out our social gatherings for the semester. That group meets every other Monday, and on the alternating Mondays, the St. Juliana the Merciful Society (formerly known as the Spouse's Program) will be meeting to help prepare us for parish life as clergy wives.

We are enjoying our new apartment immensely. It amazes me how much of a cloud I feel has lifted just from being in a larger space with more natural light. One nice thing is that we have a little nook designated for homeschooling that helps keep us neat and organized. My girls and I started the homeschool year at the end of July so that we can take a good-sized break in October when the baby comes and another one over the Christmas holidays. Now that the seminarians are back in class, almost everyone else who homeschools is back into the swing of things, too.

In addition to making plans for academic pursuits (papers due, readings to complete, etc.), church services, and social events, we've also been planning for visitors. We just had the honor of offering hospitality to our friends from Pennsylvania this weekend, and next weekend will have family visiting from Texas. After that, my mother and sister will be visiting from Kentucky in time for the baby to be born and to help out with the other two kiddos. I feel so blessed that my sister will be able to spend almost a whole month with us as I recover and we find our way back into family life with an additional child to care for. In November, we expect visits from my husband's father and stepmother, and then one from his mother around Thanksgiving. All of this is yet another reason to be thankful for our larger apartment that enables us to invite people to stay with us.

If you're looking for a way to direct your prayers for us (other than Lord, have mercy, which is always appropriate), please pray for God to help us set aside time amongst the busyness and noise to pray and seek silence. You can also continue to pray for God to provide for us financially as He wills. May He bless all of you as you begin a new church year and any other undertakings you may be planning at this time of year.

A Request for Prayers

Please pray for our friends Anna and Justin, and their unborn son Leo. He was diagnosed with hydrocephaly and the prognosis is not very good. They have difficult decisions and days ahead. May the Lord have mercy on them and the Holy Spirit comfort them and guide their decisionsl

UPDATE from Anna 8/23/10:

"Leo born this morning around 1:00. Our little angel baby breathed on his own, and instills everyone around him with love and peace. Our hearts are calm and our wishes are respected. We are grateful for being given the chance to witness him to Christ. Thank you everyone so much, and we will let you know as things progress."

2nd Update - 8/25/10:

The family have made a little blog to update people on Leo's status, if you're interested: http://leoclement.blogspot.com

If anyone is interested, here's the family newsletter we just sent out (via e-mail - snail mail ones are still coming for the few that get them).




You can click on these images to enlarge them. If you'd like a better quality document, though, just send me an e-mail (or leave a comment) with your e-mail address in it, and I'll send it to you as an attachment. Thanks for reading!

Of Bounty and Thankfulness

This doesn't seem to be the right time of year for a post with that name (at least to Americans), but thanksgiving is always relevant and in season, right?

I have a specific reason (along with so many other ongoing ones) to be thankful this morning. Last night, I took a careful look at our finances and bank account and realized that, although we had enough to pay our bills (thank God) we didn't have any money left for groceries this week or next. I wasn't worried. I thought we might have enough in the house to get by, even if it wasn't on the most delicious or nutritious meals (macaroni and cheese, anyone?). Then August would come and we'd be able to buy food again. But just now, our neighbor downstairs, a wife of another seminary family, just knocked on the door and handed me grocery money in cash. She simply said, "That's what friends are for." I give thanks to the Lord for his provision, and to the person who gave, for her generosity. Glory to God.

Of Baby Registries and Being Far Away

So, I've spent the past 4 weeks away from my husband while he has dutifully worked to earn us some money and also packed up our belongings to move them to our "new" apartment. To give you an idea of the size of the previous apartment, it is now going to be leased to a single student, and it will be just the right size for him, I think. The result of my being here in Kentucky while all the moving action is going on in New York is that I have constantly pestered my husband with e-mails about free Craigslist item postings on things I think we might need for the new place. I am sure he is getting tired of this barrage of ideas, but I feel like I have to do something to contribute from here :)

We have had a really nice, relaxing time in Kentucky with my family, which was exactly what I was hoping for. I've barely had to fix a meal while I've been here, yet have eaten enough to keep my OB/GYN fussing at me about weight gain. The girls haven't been bored for a minute, between trips to the mall's play area to Dinosaur World, in Cave City, KY, to Beech Bend & Splash Lagoon in Bowling Green, KY. We even made it down to western Kentucky to see my grandma and my other grandparents once. I was really hoping we could go back there again for the 4th of July, in fact, it's why I scheduled the vacation to last as long as I did, since all my childhood 4th of July memories are in Sturgis, KY with a picnic at my grandparents' home that always included homemade ice cream and then sitting in the backyard watching fireworks shot off from the Sturgis airport. They haven't had the picnic for years, as the family members who participated aged and/or moved away. The trees between their house and the airport have grown so tall that you can no longer clearly see the fireworks. But I was still hoping for Granddaddy Davis' homemade peach or banana ice cream. It just didn't work out with their schedule to play host to us this weekend, though, so we are making homemade ice cream today and have about three places to go for 4th of July tomorrow. Here's to new memories, right?

I would be remiss if I didn't say that today is my sweet K.'s 3rd birthday. We asked her yesterday what she might like for her birthday supper tonight and she said, "Just ice cream." When pressed to name a "growing food" for supper, she added, "Okay. Corn on the cob and ice cream. And that's that." I had to suggest pizza, and she graciously made that concession to some solid food for the rest of us :) Her pick of activity for the day is to play in the kiddie pool with the Dora & Diego toys she got for her birthday.

On an unrelated note, one of the other things I've done with all my spare time on vacation is to work on our baby registries for little L. L. We have one at Babies R Us for the rest of the main things we need, and another at Heavenly Hold for some baby-wearing items I would really like to have. We got rid of many things for babies when we moved to New York, and, if you follow my blog, you'll know that we haven't been able to retrieve some of the things that we did save from storage in Texas, so we are grateful for both the gifts we've received so far and any others we may be blessed to receive.

Happy 4th of July to everyone!

A Momentous Day - Five Years Ago...

... I was about to give birth to my oldest daughter. In a way, it seems impossible that she could be five, that I could have a five-year-old, that my husband and I could have somehow navigated through five years of parenthood without imposing serious damage on any of the involved parties. In another way, it seems like that day five years ago is so incredibly long ago. I am certainly not the person I was when I gave birth to her (thank God).

If I had known as much about babies then as I know now (which is not to say that I know all there is to know, by any means) I would have known we were in trouble when my oldest started crying (and wouldn't stop) while we were still in the hospital. She cried almost the entire night after we brought her home, and the next night was not much better. From the previous childcare experience that I had, I knew that my favorite age was from 1 to 2 years old, and, when I was pregnant, I'd looked ahead at the birth of the baby with the fear that I'd have no idea what to do with a baby smaller than that age range. I was totally dismayed to find that my fears had been founded, after all. I remember crying and crying and asking myself and my husband, "Who thought it was a good idea to give me this baby to take care of by myself?" "What if I can't do this?"

I know this sounds like it's starting to be more a post about myself as a parent than my daughter, whose birthday it is, but I'm getting there. :) Fortunately, the answer to my first question was that it was God who had thought it was a good idea to give me this difficult baby. He knew that only she could give the the kind of formation I needed. She was a colicky baby, who turned into a happy, engaging older infant and early walker, who then metamorphosed into a toddler whose intelligence, sensitivity, and propensity towards high emotions often made her hard to predict and even harder to control or even to help her control herself. The older she got, the more it became clear to me that she didn't want to be crying herself into hysterics, but she just didn't know how to stop.

Her little sister, K., was a welcome addition to her world. H. doted on her and wanted to hold her and kiss her, but I found myself constantly feeling torn between my extremely high-needs toddler and my newborn infant. I guess this is the same feeling any parent with more than one child feels, but I don't think I handled it very well. Somehow we all survived that period of time, and now the two of them are the best of friends. I think K. will turn out to have been one of God's greatest blessings to H. as she looks back on her life. Because of having to interact with someone similar in age and interests to her own, H. has to learn skills to help her get along. She's learned how to do things like distract K. with something else (when that was age-appropriate), how to wait until K. got tired of things, and as they get older, she's learning to negotiate for a turn at activities she wants that K. is doing (and vice versa). In her sister, H. has a playmate who doesn't just go along with all of her authoritatively-expressed schemes for play like so many of her friends do (yes, I'm saying she's bossy, very bossy). She has to figure out how to win K. over, and I think that's good for her.

Since my husband and I hope to homeschool our children for as long as we can, another of the aspects of my daughter that I get to be privy to is her academic life. In keeping with my expectations that the child of two academically-minded parents would be that way herself, I started trying to teach H. to read once she turned three. I spent the school year that year introducing her to one letter sound per week through a variety of means. We learned target words that started with that sound, memorized a poem each week that had one of the target words in it, read at least 15 books that had the sound or the target words in them (including nonfiction science and history books), we did outdoor observations, arts and crafts, and even mathematics lessons to reinforce the letter and its sound. We sang song after song, like "Eddie Elephant Eats Everything." You can see the photo album I made for her of our lessons that year on Snapfish. She had most of the puzzle pieces to begin linking sounds and reading simple words, but she just wasn't interested in doing it. That was okay. She was clearly a smart kid, but reading just didn't appeal to her yet.

Even while she was three, there were times that her emotions would get out of control, especially when she was overtired or hungry, and she would scream and scream and be unable to be reasoned with. I remember my husband taking her into a closet and holding her while she screamed her head off when we stayed the night at a friend's house to try to keep her from waking the entire household at 5 a.m. But these times when she "lost it" got less and less frequent. She was an incredibly fast runner (which I never had any inclination towards), always thinking of big ideas and figuring things out that didn't seem like they were on the normal 3-year-old level, and she was fiercely independent, learning to do so many things on her own (which you can imagine was helpful to me in many ways) but also challenging me on almost every point when asked to do or stop doing something. She was wonderful. She was still exhausting, too!

At age four, I began using a "real" curriculum with workbook lessons and handwriting work. This was where I saw her really take off. She loved getting the answers "right." I enjoyed seeing her learn pre-reading skills that were really going to help her. She had little patience for writing her letters, but we were using a curriculum that forced her to slow down. There were lots of read-aloud stories that even K. enjoyed. "School," quickly became our favorite time of day together. I wasn't even working on math with her, but it's already clear that that will be one of her strengths. She comes up with word problems on her own and solves them!

Between four and five, the major change I see in H. is that she is becoming more and more as a separate person from me. This is a painful (for me) process, yet I know that it is necessary. When I see her with her friends, she says things to them that reveal a thought-life that she doesn't share with us at home. It reminds me that she's her own person and that this process of individuation has only just begun. I pray that the Holy Spirit will guide that process and help me teach her what she needs to know to do it wisely.

She is still a rule-nick, quick to point out any violation of rules to anyone who even suggests offending them. She often tries to negotiate her way out of whatever I ask her to do, but if it becomes clear that I'm not budging, then she does it. It's not as much of a struggle as it once was to get her to comply. She has the most beautiful smile and laugh. She is amazingly quick-witted, handling even my dad's jokester ways with a quick retort. She's so excited to learn to read that she's ready to start kindergarten as soon as we get back to New York. Before we left for vacation, she'd ask for her phonics textbook so she could just look at it (it has no pictures in it). She loves to climb on things and jump from high places and still loves to run. She loves going to church school, especially when she already knows the answers! I hope that her birthday tomorrow and the whole experience of being five are just as exciting for her as she seems convinced they will be. God bless my precious H. on her 5th birthday!

Have New Apartment, Need Stuff (Here)

We found out about a week ago that we should be getting a 3-bedroom apartment sometime this summer. We are really excited about being able to do things like walk from the kitchen into the hallway without having to turn sideways and lift whatever you are carrying up over your head to avoid its colliding with the furniture! And, since the baby will live there until he or she is over a year-and-a-half old, it will be nice to have a place for him/her to sleep that is not our room.

I do have a request, though. If any of you readers out there are moving to St. Vlad's or the New York area this summer/fall and are starting out in or passing through the Oklahoma/Texas region, we would really like to share moving van space with you. We brought most of the stuff that we didn't sell when we moved here last August, but we didn't bring baby furniture and gear. That stayed in storage with family in Fort Worth. We would really like to have that here, but it's such a small number of boxes that it would really be MUCH more efficient if we could share a little bit of someone else's moving truck instead of renting our own and making the trip once again. We have a few boxes of baby gear, a crib, a changing table, and a bookshelf.

Hopefully it would be beneficial for the other family as well. I know we had extra space in our moving truck last year, and we sure could have used the money provided by someone for letting them use up that extra space to help us defray some of the expenses of moving. We would be willing to pay you for the extra length of moving truck/van you might have to rent, the inconvenience of arranging to pick up our load, and our share of the gas money. We're willing to take the stuff from Fort Worth to someplace nearby, like Tulsa, Shreveport, Little Rock, Amarillo, etc. if that's more convenient to where you are or to your travel route.

So I'm hoping to get the word out via my blog, and I've asked my husband to do the same on his Oh Taste and See blog, which is much more widely read. If you fit the bill, please contact one of us. If you know of someone else who does, we'd be ever so grateful if you would let them know about our situation. Thanks!