little thoughts

{pretty, happy, funny, real} – a busy week

Posted on 2015-09-17 by kristinabean

I really do have some great pictures this week from our visit to the splashpad on Tuesday (I’m trying to go as much as possible while the weather is still warm, because it’s a great way to get the kids out of the house), but I haven’t gotten them uploaded from my camera.

There should be some pictures of our little garden on there too. We’ve planted beets, corn, basil, sage, mint, and oregano so far and they’re doing ok, except for a row of the corn that looks pretty burnt. Now that it’s starting to get cooler, though (highs in the 90s!) I’d like to plant my leafy greens for the fall growing season, too – it’s just about the right time to plant cilantro, arugula, kale, and spinach – all of which seem to be hard to eat when purchased from a store but which are tossed easily into just about every meal when available in the backyard garden. Do you find that to be true in your house as well? The store-bought produce will often go bad before I use it all up (especially greens), but anything that we grow ourselves is devoured immediately!

Sometimes it seems like life is a juggling act and I’m a very clumsy juggler – at least one ball always seems to be getting dropped. On a positive note, we got a lot of laundry and house-cleaning done this weekend, thanks to my very helpful husband, so I don’t feel overwhelmed in every area of life right now, just the normal two to three areas. The kids had peed on all the beds so the laundry was fairly important… and spilled a bowl of cereal (dry) under the couch, so vacuuming was rather needed as well… so it goes with toddlers, I suppose.

I do have a {real} picture for the first time, though, from one of the more hectic nights this week!

What do you do with a baby who wants to see what you’re doing and be in the kitchen but won’t consent to being held still in a wrap and is too unsteady and short to stand on a chair? I don’t know what your solution is, but apparently mine is to let him play sans diaper in the kitchen sink… The toddler heard me putting said baby in the sink and requested to play as well, and surprisingly they played together in peace for the 10-15 minutes I needed to finish getting dinner made.

You can see all the groceries still sitting out on the counter too… they didn’t get put away until after bedtime. But at least it was all clean and straightened up before I went to bed, so I wouldn’t have to wake up to the mess! It’s the little things 🙂

Don’t forget to head over to the link-up and visit other blogs! It’s encouraging to see the crazy and the happy in everyone else’s life, at least for me – it gives me the reassurance that we’re all in this together and no one is doing it perfectly, but that we can all choose to see beauty and find contentment right where we are.

links, musings

fake news

Posted on 2015-09-162015-09-16 by kristinabean

It’s Easy To Get People To Believe Fake “News.” Here’s How.

“…it is interesting if nothing else that people who will not believe tens of thousands of Syrians who say “We are fleeing the war” will believe a single, unnamed, unidentified “Syrian ISIS operative” who claims ISIS has placed agents all over Europe ready for orders.”

I’ve seen these ISIS stories shared on Facebook by friends that I had considered intelligent, mature Christians. What does it say about American Christianity that we are willing to believe any far-fetched article that purports to confirm our prejudices? And what does it say about us when we let fear for our own safety override the need to love and the opportunity to be like Christ?

book lists, family life

favorite books at just past two

Posted on 2015-09-152015-09-14 by kristinabean

I think it is a good idea to keep track of the best and most-loved books I come across, if for nothing else than to remember to pull them out for younger siblings or give them as gifts to friends and family 🙂 These are some of our favorites – books that Rondel asks for over and over again and that can be read over and over again by me or my husband without inducing insanity.

Just for reference, at the time of this list, Rondel is 26 months old.

Corduroy, by Don Freeman, 1976

This is a classic story about friendship and home, from the perspective of a toy bear looking for his button. Everyday things and circumstances are described with the kind of wide-eyed wonder that a little kid is going to have as he encounters the world, without losing their simplicity. I think it is hard to capture that kind of innocence in an urban setting in kids’ books, at least from the books that I’ve read, and so this book is great for those of us who live in the city and can’t rely on nature to fuel our children’s sense of wonder and exploration. But more than that, Corduroy the bear is simply an endearing character who quickly finds a place in the reader’s heart. Despite this being a longer book, Rondel asks for it often and gives it rapt attention.

Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, by Richard Scarry, 1974

This has been a favorite of my son’s for a long time now! It can be read cover-to-cover for the story of the Pig family going to the beach, or simply enjoyed on a page-by-page basis for the illustrations and humor. At this point we usually just read a page or two at a time, because it is a long book and Rondel is more interested in the different vehicles on each page than in the story anyway. Especially if your child is obsessed with cars and trucks, this is a good book to have in your home library.

A Child’s Treasury of Nursery Rhymes, collected by Kady MacDonald Denton, 1998

I’m sure there are a lot of excellent poetry collections available for younger kids, but this is ours, and we love it. Rondel has been asking to read from it at bedtime every day for several weeks now, and when we read from it during the day he keeps asking for more. He’s starting to have favorite poems as well, like the flying-man poem or the chuff-chuff-chuff train poem. Because each poem is illustrated, he has visual anchors to connect with the words and rhythms, which is an advantage over my other favorite poetry collection. There are of course a few poems that feel odd and out of place, or not quite appropriate for the age of the intended audience, but overall the poems are perfect in feel and content and the layout of words and pictures on each page is very well done. The poems lend themselves quite well to finger games, roughhousing, and cuddling also!

Little Fur Family, by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Garth Williams, 1970

This book is, in my mind, very similar to Corduroy in the way it captures the wonder and simplicity of everyday life. In this case, the setting is a normal day in the life of a little fur child who lives in the woods. He spends all day playing outside by himself, making discoveries, observing the world around him with all his senses; Brown uses simple but evocative language to describe what he sees and feels and hears. Then, at the end of the day, he returns home to the comfort and security of his family, whose love and presence is clearly shown. I have always loved this book, even as a single adult. The prose has just enough meter to feel rhythmic and almost musical without falling into a rhyme-y or sing-song pattern, and the illustrations are absolutely beautiful.

“Could Be Worse!”, by James Stevenson, 1987

This book is definitely intended for slightly older children, but Rondel enjoys the vibrant illustrations, the repeated theme (“Could be worse!”), and the ridiculously tall tale unexpectedly told by the grandpa. He doesn’t get all the humor, or some of the more subtle layers of the book, but he likes it enough anyways to ask for it 5-6 times a day! I have a suspicion that he pictures his own grandpa doing some of the crazier things in the story… 🙂

In addition to these top five, there are quite a few board books that Rondel loves and that are easier to read when Limerick is around, since he has a tendency to try to rip the picture books. But I will save those for another post as this one is already quite long!

musings

joy in the giving

Posted on 2015-09-142015-09-12 by kristinabean

Exhausted and overwhelmed, my baby falls toward me, too tired to reach out and ask with his hands, nuzzling into me with the desperate eagerness born of a bedtime car ride. His wails shudder into little whimpers as he nurses, finally finding the comfort and security he was craving. I feel his soft baby skin up against mine, his little hand reaching around to pat my side in a little gesture of contentment. Gratitude is too grown-up of a word for his emotion, an adult interpretation of the simple wordless feelings that swell up within him. He had felt need; now he feels joy. And the gentle sleepy happiness pulsing through him seeps into me through those little fingers hugging me, that slight pressure of his body resting on mine, and I know with utter certainty that this love-giving brings me some of the fiercest joy and deepest satisfaction that I have ever known.

contemplating the rain It’s remarkable how this little person – who has worn me out, brought me to the end of my patience, and demanded every ounce of energy in my being – can also give me such incredible fulfillment, in the very act of meeting his needs. It’s a biological necessity, of course: our species wouldn’t last very long with such dependent and needy offspring without a compensating hormonal surge in the parents! The snuggling they need to feel comforted and secure triggers the production of oxytocin in us, helping us to feel bonded and loving towards them. I think, though, that it also speaks to a spiritual truth: that in giving ourselves in love, we find a deeper peace and joy than we would have found in simply pursuing our own ends. It makes sense to me that God would have designed the physical truth to reflect the spiritual truth, in one of the myriad of ways that our bodies transmit His image into the visible, physical world. But the spiritual truth is greater and wider than its physical counterpart, for we can love others in this self-giving way besides just our own children, and though the biological reaction will be lacking, the spiritual fulfillment and joy will still be present. The lesson is most easily learned in the crucible of the family; my prayer is that I would also apply it in the wider spheres around me.

musings

parenting goals

Posted on 2015-09-122015-09-09 by kristinabean

If, I as said yesterday, the goal of parenting isn’t to produce adults in a sort of factory way – where each new adult meets the required minimum specifications if the right parenting techniques are employed – and if in fact it is impossible to control the outcome of parenting since our children have wills of their own – then what is the ultimate goal?

At this (admittedly very early) stage of my parenting experience I would submit that the ultimate goal of parenting is to multiply and model love. By meeting the needs of our babies when they cry in the night, or cluster feed all day, or panic when we leave the room, we show them that love can be trusted. By playing with our toddlers instead of sending them off to play alone and stay our of way, by reading them the same books over and over again to their delight, by listening and responding to their obsessive, repetitive, conversations and story lines, we show them that love values their unique personal significance. By giving them space to try, grace to fail, encouragement to try again, and a helping hand when they’re overwhelmed, we show them that love will not shame them or make them afraid. By involving them in household chores, teaching them how to care for their rooms and toys and help with the family and home, we show them that love cares for the community and the environment. By coaching them through sibling rivalries, we show them that love works hard for harmony and understanding. By instilling the habits of virtue – hard work, self-control, patience, and courage – we show them that love is not a weak and tolerant niceness, but an agent for goodness.

(Babies have a way of emotionally evoking our love, which is good, since they demand a lot of it. They seem to need it most when they’re least cute and endearing, though… that is why our love needs to be strong, built on conviction and on the love of Christ for us, so that we can give it unconditionally and in abundant measure.)

My highest calling as a Christian, and thus as a parent, is to love. Remember the classic verse that says it is even greater than faith and hope, those crucial virtues of the Christian life? That same passage also gives us some guidelines about what love looks like in action. If I take that love into my parenting and make it my key principle – a love that holds fast, that sacrifices, that labors for redemption, that suffers joyfully, that unites my heart to Christ – then, I think, it will be hard to go very wrong. The most nefarious danger would be in replacing love with a weak sort of kindness that neglects the long-term needs of the child (the deep soul-needs of virtue and character and purpose, as well as the very practical need of care for the self, others, and ones environment) in an effort to maintain superficial “happiness” and satisfaction. Love requires us to pour ourselves out, sometimes with great effort, pain, and sacrifice, for the genuine needs of the other person as a human person with inherent dignity and value, not a pet or a project. There aren’t scripts to follow or techniques to use; it is as far from mechanistic as it is possible to be, I think. It is not easy, because it is being like Christ, and our hearts are full of all sorts of tendencies that pull us away from Him and from the difficult path of love. But it is the goal – to love our God, to love our spouse, to love our children, and to teach them how to love in return, so that the love in our homes is multiplied in each heart, reflected in each member of the family, springing up in beauty and fullness and mutual self-sacrifice, filling up and surrounding us all.

musings

parenting determinism

Posted on 2015-09-112015-09-09 by kristinabean

A lot of parenting tips, techniques, and strategies seem to operate under the presumption that if you parent your children just right, they will turn out just the way you want them (which of course differs from family to family based on the parents’ values). Maybe this is a particular problem with religious parenting guides – they play on parents’ worries and hopes for their children by promising (usually not explicitly, but the idea is there) that if you just follow these guidelines, your children are guaranteed to end up as responsible, successful, Christian adults. The corollary is then obviously that if your child ends up as an atheist, or in a less-than-ideal profession, or has children out of wedlock, or differs in some other way from the “perfect little Christian” mold, you somehow failed as a parent.

But since those promises are empty and false, the guilt of the corollary is equally false. There is absolutely nothing you can do, as a parent, to guarantee that your child will become a certain type of person as an adult, and to try to force that result is detrimental to you, your child, and your relationship. (Your ability to influence your child is a different matter altogether… if your child loves and respects you, he is probably going to want to live in a way that honors you, even when he disagrees with you.) You might be able to enforce certain beliefs and behaviors while your child is young, but the time will come, sooner or later, when your baby will be all grown up and make choices for himself.

(Even this little guy is someday going to be a man! It’s strange to think of it now, but that’s the end we have to keep in sight as parents. They do grow up.)

It all comes down to the free will God gave to each and every one of us. God, our Father, is the perfect parent, is He not? And yet we, His children, most definitely have character issues and make bad choices – I can speak for myself on that one, and I think everyone who is being honest would agree. It doesn’t reflect back on His parenting; it simply means that you can give someone all the tools and guidance and love in the world, but if they don’t want to accept it, if they want to make a different choice than the one you feel is best, you can’t force them to use what you’ve given them.

In toddler analogies, I can give my son a fork, show him how to use a fork, model using a fork, and help him use a fork – but if he wants to eat with his fingers, I can’t make him pick up that fork and use it independently. He has to make that decision for himself. The same thing is true for my child’s faith, education, career choices, and relationships – I can give him opportunities, model wise choices, and demonstrate unconditional love, but I cannot ensure that he will take the opportunities that arise, act wisely, or love in return. He has to appropriate for himself everything he has been given and make it truly his own, because he, like me, is a human individual with will, dignity, and subjectivity. It is a cause for deep, deep sorrow when a person chooses to use his body and mind for self-destructive or sinful ends – but it is not a sorrow that must always be tinged with guilt.

This is why I get so frustrated with the parenting articles and books I come across that make it sound like you can determine what sort of person your child will become, and give the impression that this is the ultimate goal of parenting. All we can do is teach, model, and love – and then commit their hearts and minds and futures to the Father. We can’t choose the direction they will take, but we can do our best to equip them with the skills and habits that lead to virtue and wisdom, and then trust our Lord with the rest.

family life, phfr

{pretty, happy, funny, real} – labor day

Posted on 2015-09-102015-09-12 by kristinabean

For Labor Day my mom and I were both free (we work at academic institutions that frown upon working on Labor Day!) and I took the babies down to her house for the whole day. We spent the morning getting her garden ready for the fall planting season (all our seasons are different down here in the low desert) and swimming in her pool, then swam again in the afternoon after my husband and dad were finished working and could come down, and had a delicious gumbo for dinner courtesy of my mom and brother. I’ve never actually had a gumbo that I liked before… I think this one is going to have to enter my recipe files!

{pretty}

climbing on the oregano in the raised bed garden!

(By the way, I’m so thankful that we live near my parents! The boys and their grandparents have a really special relationship, and it always makes me happy to see all those people, whom I love so much, loving each other and enjoying time spent with each other.)

{happy}

Some advantages of helping my mom with her garden: transplants of oregano and mint to take home to my garden, along with some basil and sage from the nursery (we all went with her since she wanted some new pepper plants), and a bag full of processed oregano from the massive overgrown oregano bush! She and my brother have been processing the leaves with a bit of olive oil in the food processor and freezing it in ice cube trays (my idea – and I harvested the oregano – but they did the more tedious work of stripping the leaves). It really is a handy way to store excess fresh herbs, and then a cube can be pulled out to use as a sauté base for vegetables, or part of a light sauce for pasta, or even as an herby sauce for a white pizza.

(I thawed one last night and used it as the beginnings of a pasta salad dressing, with a touch more oil and a bit of red wine vinegar to brighten it up, in lieu of lemon juice)

{funny}

I love the look on this kid’s face! And he loves jumping into the pool (actually, he likes to hold your hands and kind of step in off the side into the water… he did jump all by himself with both feet a few times though!) – and swimming in the pool, and knocking Daddy down in the pool, and pretty much everything to do with the pool.

What’s my {real} for this week? Just that all good things come to an end, I guess 🙂 I’m not very good at getting pictures of the {real} in life, now that I think of it – maybe I’ll show you guys the state of my kitchen floor one week…

I hope you all had a great holiday weekend too! Check out the rest of the link-up here 🙂

poems

summer rain

Posted on 2015-09-092015-09-09 by kristinabean

raindrops falling

on the concrete, on the street

springing off the surface of the swimming pools

we catch them on our tongues

dancing in the downpour

rejoicing in summer’s reprieve

the world is new again

we are new again

family life

no no no no (and no!)

Posted on 2015-09-072015-09-14 by kristinabean

Rondel is entering toddlerhood and with that has come a marked uptick in his use of the word “no.”

“Do you want to go to the library?” (one of his favorite destinations)

“no library!”

“Are you hungry?”

“no hungry! no food! no dinner!” (followed by a blood sugar crash about 30 minutes later)

He’ll even hear me offering something to Limerick and say no for him!

I’m not even sure what he was unhappy about here… this pool was one of his favorite places over the summer

I know on a rational level that this is normal and good. The development of opinion, will, and identity is an extremely important aspect of toddlerhood, and when the pendulum swings away from the automatic compliance of babyhood it tends to swing a bit farther than we parents would like. Rondel’s petulance and negativity are simply part and parcel of his growing up, of the huge transition taking place in his mind as it matures, and they probably overwhelm him, and throw him off balance, just as much as they irritate me.

In the moment, however, it is incredibly hard to deal with the litany of “no!”s and respond to my boy with patience, gentleness, and love. If I’m honest with myself, I sometimes just want to scream at him to shut up and stop saying no. But that would be so detrimental to his development as an individual! While his will needs to ultimately submit to God’s authority, just like every other part of his being, it needs to be able to grow and mature so that in its submission to God it is a complete, beautiful, and useful tool. So instead of trying to break or control his will as it emerges from the cocoon of babyhood, my responsibility as his parent is to guide its maturation – to give him the space and freedom to use it and experience the natural fallout of using it, within clear and safe boundaries of course 🙂

connection and communication – that’s the goal, anyway

Let’s just say I’m going to need an increase in the fruit of the Spirit to match this increase of the Little Man’s will! With God’s grace, I’m hoping we can make it through this season with joy, trust, and understanding intact, instead of turning our relationship into a never-ending power struggle.

musings, quotes

from darkness to darkness

Posted on 2015-09-052015-09-04 by kristinabean

Migration is not a new problem in the world. How could it be, when sin and hope both spring eternal in the human heart, in this valley between Eden and Paradise? There have always been evils to flee; there have always been havens of peace or places of freedom to seek. And for as long as there have been migrants, there have been doors slammed shut, walls erected, opportunities denied, and the ones who suffer the most are the innocent.

I remember the stories I grew up learning in the history books of the Irish immigrants to the US in the 1800s, fleeing unjust British landlords and the blight of the potato famine, who endured the cramped, unsanitary, steerage traveling quarters across the Atlantic at the hands of unscrupulous ship-owners; the dehumanizing ordeal of Ellis Island, running the gauntlet of rules and officials indifferent to human dignity or family unity; and the oppressing poverty and bigoted exclusion offered them in those big American cities that had promised from afar to be places of hope and potential.

Living relatively near the US-Mexico border, I remember the stories I’ve read in the news and heard from friends of the Mexican immigrants smuggled across that invisible boundary from one land to the other, facing heatstroke, thirst, and starvation under the fierce and wild desert sun, leaving loved ones, communities, and everything familiar behind, willing to forego the fullness of the benefits offered only to citizens – the health insurance, welfare, college opportunities, and most well-paying, skilled employment – because even the crumbs that fall from the table are, to them, worth the pain and the risk of the journey.

And now, from the other side of the world, the stories are coming of the refugees from Syria, escaping ISIS with maybe only the clothes on their back, their communities already shattered, their culture and traditions surviving only in the tenuousness of diaspora; the refugees from the civil wars of Africa, escaping terrorists and oppression, longing for the freedom to speak freely, to write freely, to think freely, without fear of death or imprisonment; all of them funneling through that historic sea, small in volume but great in its significance to so many civilizations and individuals, risking their own deaths and the deaths of the people they love most in all the world in the hope of a new home, a new life, a new freedom.

None of these immigrants ever asked for their homelands and communities to be torn apart; none of them desired to be oppressed, beat down, closed off from freedom and opportunity. They are human people, like you and like me, yearning for peace, for the love of family, for the solidarity of community, for the freedom to think and speak and act with authenticity and integrity and without fear, for the opportunity to both embrace our traditions and reach for the future. And their peace has been stolen from them; their families splintered; their communities devastated; their freedoms squeezed and shrunk; their ties with the past shaking like a weak thread; and their futures – if we shut our doors in their faces – destroyed. They risk their lives because the slim hope of a better future in a faraway land is the only thing they have left. The policies that make the journey more dangerous do not turn them away; they simply cause more death along the way.

Are we hypocrites for becoming passionate and incensed about other nations’ response to a refugee crisis on the other side of the world, when we turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to the cries for justice and hope in our own neighborhoods and on the other side of our border fences? Probably yes. But it is not hypocritical to care about the Syrian refugee crisis and the deaths on the Mediterranean and simply not know how to respond to either that migration crisis or the issues more close to home. It is not hypocritical to weep for the lives lost, the hopes shattered, the dreams destroyed, wherever the loss took place. On the contrary, to scroll past the images of what is happening with a dry eye and a complacent heart may be the signs of a cold and calloused conscience. May God give us the grace to mourn with those who mourn, and begin the labor of redemption and hope with tears and laments for what has already been.

Back in 2013 Pope Francis gave a message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees that is still relevant in light of the escalating immigrant crisis. You can read it in its entirety here, but I particularly love these words of hope near the end:

“Every human being is a child of God! He or she bears the image of Christ! We ourselves need to see, and then to enable others to see, that migrants and refugees do not only represent a problem to be solved, but are brothers and sisters to be welcomed, respected and loved. They are an occasion that Providence gives us to help build a more just society, a more perfect democracy, a more united country, a more fraternal world and a more open and evangelical Christian community. Migration can offer possibilities for a new evangelization, open vistas for the growth of a new humanity foreshadowed in the paschal mystery: a humanity for which every foreign country is a homeland and every homeland is a foreign country.”

Where there is sin, where there is pain, there also is room for God’s grace and healing to come, through His people, to the broken world, for its restoration and redemption.

If you want to know what can be done to help with the Syrian refugee crisis specifically, Ann Voskamp did an excellent job compiling a list of ideas, organizations, and resources here. The pictures she’s compiled there, also, are heart-rending. Maybe if we open our hearts and move past our complacency, we can help make these migrants’ journey one of hope, ending with a better future, instead of the voyage from darkness to darkness that it all too often has become.