The Perils of Over-Planning

Being an artist of any kind requires stepping back and looking at life as a source for material to create art. Giving birth is hard on an artist, because there is no stepping back. You have to be there. On the other hand, how else would you ever get such a deep experience out of life? Diving in and being fully present makes for better, richer material. It's just painful--especially giving birth.
You may have noticed, faithful readers, that I like to plan. I was warned not only by experience but also by experts that this was going to be my most difficult birth/post-partum period ever, so I really went at it. We have almost all the summer shopping done--Kurt even has new socks. I won't be doing any cooking for at least another month as the freezer is still pretty full. (The food is great. I recommend Fix Freeze Feast.) The kids are discovering little rewards and treats as the days unfold--I'll give you the skinny on that later, they read the blog. To sum up, my eldest commented a few days ago that we had come this far and everything is still running smoothly. She felt that is pretty impressive, and I must agree. :)
The difficulty with being so prepared is, what happens when you check the last thing off the checklist? You give birth. At least I did. My doctor had decided that inducing was a good idea since we thought this guy was going to be as big or bigger than his brother (a ten pounder, oy vay.) We set the date for the fourteenth and I went right to work finishing up the checklist. I got my haircut. I bought the candy for the nurses. We arranged for childcare. The Braxton-Hicks became stronger, but remained irregular. The next day I finished up the little things I was planning to make the kids feel good, and as soon as I took the cookies out of the oven I started to worry. My second and I sat down to watch Harry Potter together and just as the Weasley twins were putting their names in the Goblet of Fire, my water broke.
You would think I'd be alarmed, but I wasn't. I'd given birth five times before and I am a slowpoke when it comes to giving birth. It takes me forever to get going, though in my defense, my doctor says it goes really fast once I commit. This time I must have been pre-committed. We went from the nurses being uncertain about keeping me to welcoming the baby into the world in three hours. The anasthesialogist didn't even make it to the hospital. My OB, (the incomparable Dr. David) walked in the door and played catch. All things considered it was a great birth.
Not that I was great at it. Experience does not make you better at things. I do much better with an epidural. God bless my nurses. They let me keep hoping for that epidural long after we all knew it wasn't happening. The pain was less of a problem than the fear. Giving birth to a ten pounder had been difficult with an epidural, I didn't know if I had what it took to do it without one. Fortunately, this guy was a svelte 7 lbs. 15 oz. He slid out of there like the proverbial greased pig. If I'd have known that, there would have been a lot less begging, flailing and general freaking out. Like I always say, any birth where everyone is breathing at the end is a good birth. By that standard I did fine.
In summary, put something impossible on your pre-birth checklist, or ignore something really important, unless you're in a hurry to have that baby.

Baby is Here!

Ok, baby has been here. Our latest addition--a boy--arrived April 12 at 11:40. He really wanted to avoid being born on the thirteenth. I'd have posted before, but I'm older than I was before and recovery is going slower. He is beautiful and good-natured. We are thoroughly enjoying parenting six, but we are also rather tired. More info later, and hopefully a picture, later.

Waking up in the Grave

On Holy Saturday, I woke up in the grave. The night had been spent in one of those repeating nightmares, and we had cleaning the basement on the agenda. The basement is our classroom, and all those educational toys and manipulatives add up to way too many moving parts and a giant hassle. Easter errands needed running too, and I decided that cowardice was the better part of valor and ran off to do errands while Kurt and the kids got the basement started.
Ladies, you know how that goes. I did improve my mood significantly, which was good since not much had happened since I left. The floor was laid out in masking tape squares which were keyed into little prizes. It was kind of a random bingo game, but the kids were just not able to do the kind of work that needed done without help. Kurt and I got things going, and really, it was one of the best day's work we'd ever spent as a family in the basement. All prizes were earned, and we had done it without getting frustrated with each other.
We had just enough time left to eat dinner and get ready for the Easter Vigil, which was our first ever, and it was wonderful. The candles and the Scripture, I love reverence and the Easter Vigil was my kind of Easter service. I was quickly moving out of the grave and into the new life we were celebrating.
Easter Sunday, the youngest woke up under the weather, so Kurt took the girls to the Protestant service. There were a few hiccups in the day, but they opened opportunities for important dialogue with my children on a day when they felt absolutely loved. All things weighed I came through the Easter season awakened in a deeper way to the new freedoms and possibilities of my life. Much of the bitterness and fear from the past melted away like that old nightmare as I cleaned and celebrated and talked to my children. It wasn't the kind of Damascus road experience my old life was always hoping for, but it was the road to Emmaus. I did wake up to new faith.

No Creative Energy to Spare

I'm sorry about the huge gap on this blog, but I have no creative energy to spare. At the moment it's all pouring into my son and my home. Getting ready for a new baby is a big job, and I just don't move as fast as I used to. Progress has been made, but I still have 3 bedrooms and the basement to do major decluttering to. This is after 4 maybe 5 trips to Goodwill.
Everyone is contributing and I am finishing up plans and shopping. We have all the summer clothing purchased. Most of the baby stuff is found, though very little is actually ready to go. Plans for making the five kids who are already born feel important are mostly finalized. Little by little, it's all coming together. I just wish I could move faster. It's all too slow, and I can't climb up to get to the high stuff. One thing at a time I guess.
Don't expect much writing.

Baby Drive

A year or two ago, I was working on a book called Pregnant Rituals. The book was a compilation of all the little things I do to cope with pregnancy. For some reason I got bored with it and set it aside. I don't think I'll be picking it back up, but I am picking back up on the rituals. It's instinctive. Coping mechanisms that made past pregnancies doable push themselves forward insisting that they get done.
The first is filling the freezer. I currently have 62 main dishes frozen and 11 side dishes. Later this afternoon I hope to make some garlic mashed potato sides to round everything out. I think after the mashed potatoes I'll be done with that. Mentally, I've moved on to deep cleaning and organizing the house. Things that have sat on the to-do list for far too long are being attended to, and lots of stuff will be going to Goodwill. One room at a time, that's the strategy for getting through such a huge task. After the house is put in order, I'll start scrubbing up and organizing all the baby things. I like to have everything laid out and waiting. Finally, I pack a bag for the hospital. I hope I still have the little bag I use. It may have been a casualty of the maternity purge.
I hope you have as big a blessing to motivate you to freshen up your life, today. Blessings!

Step Nine

Books and stories have always been my bread and butter. My early goal was to be an elementary teacher, but when the coursework ended up being more about bulletin boards and laminating I bailed in favor of Secondary English. It was a good choice, even if I really didn't get everything out of it I could have. Student teaching though was a nightmare. My university supervisor said I did quite well actually, but my supervising teacher tried to fail me. When I came home for the summer, I disliked everything having to do with the experience. I spent the next three years teaching preschool and kindergarten.
My supervising teacher was quite a fan of female Southern authors, and the one week she taught while I was there she lectured on Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find. It was the weirdest story I'd ever heard. I'd spent most of my credits immersed in literature from the ancients to the 17th century. The most modern class I'd taken was a survey course of the second half of English literature. I don't remember much after we left the Romantic period. Modern literature was too much of a wilderness for my taste, so those lectures were just strange. Wandering the aisles at my local library the summer after graduation, I came across, The Violent Bear It Away. I picked it up mostly to comfort myself that my supervising teacher had been a moron, and ended up being completely blown away. The book was the most accurate picture of redemption I had ever read.
Growing up Baptist, any contemporary literature I read on the theme of redemption was largely a waste of time--another reason I didn't spend many credit hours on modern lit--and completely focused on the moment of conversion. The whole of the book was about getting someone, anyone, down the aisle to that magic moment when redemption took place, and the rest was unimportant. Flannery's view was raw, honest and awful. She tore open that moment where grace becomes visible and displayed it in all its horror. It was like seeing the difference between a sitcom birth and a real one. No one in my community wrote like this. No one in my community saw like this. If I was ever going to write, I was going to write like that. I began to feel the need for a different community, one that would nurture such honest vision. I began to wonder if Flannery's home wasn't as evil as I had been lead to believe.
This series begins Here. This series continues Here.

It all started with the hats

This summer's theme is going to be Simple! Simple! Simple! With a new baby to tote around, I'm going to be taking every shortcut I know and inventing some new ones. Keeping track of the kids when we're running to classes or going on field trips is important, and sometimes difficult as there are five of them and only one or two of us. I like to give the kids some freedom to explore such exciting environments as museums, but the constant echo-location and head-counting takes some of the joy out of the trip for me. One great thing we borrowed from my day camp days is matching shirts. Last year, Kurt had brought home bright yellow shirts from Sweden, and they made museum trips much easier. This year I want to bring that simplicity to every day.
We get the Oriental Trading Company catalog because I used to be a teacher, but I didn't really order much until we started making such a big deal out of Christmas Eve. Other than Christmas, I usually hand the catalog over to the kids and they enjoy all the crazy stuff and cut it up for pictures. This year, I went looking for hats. Hats don't have to be washed, and they are easy to spot. My first choice was some cute little ducks, but my oldest flatly professed she'd rather be dead than seen in that hat. After much searching and debating we found a set of monkey hats that come in six colors, and everyone agreed that they'd make for a fun summer.
The hats got me thinking. If everyone is going to have a specific color this year.... Soon we had coordinating water bottles, magnets, and some secret treats I'll set aside to liven up long trips and other hazards of the summer. Then came the next big thought. What if I bought them T-shirts in the co-ordinating colors of their hats? Bought in bulk the shirts would be very inexpensive and I'd have an easy time managing laundry all summer. The kids would be even easier to spot, and getting out the door for swim class would be fast. I brought the idea up with fear and trembling, expecting my oldest to veto, but instead they all think it's great.
I found a bulk T-shirt site on line, and I think I'll get some Bermuda shorts from French Toast. With the usual crop of cut-offs from the winter, we should be able to deck everybody out for next to nothing, and have one of the easiest and hopefully happiest summers on record.
Now, if only I could find cute little monkey appliques for the shorts.... :)