First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes...a houseplant, then a dog?

Yes, I must admit, mindless Sulvans that we were, we actually followed this cute progression so often recommended by well-meaning people. You know: start out "parenting" a plant. If the plant lives, you can move on to a dog. If you do all right with the dog, then you can think about kids. We even joked about it when we moved into our very first tiny apartment and went out to buy our very first tiny houseplant together.

I guess that the whole "take some time to get to know each other and have fun before you have kids" is only the logical extension of the ridiculously prolonged adolescence our culture fosters.

Or is it the other way around: Does the Sulvan (contraceptive) mentality discourage us from growing up?

Really: We don't have to grow up and have mature relationships (married or not) if we don't have to be responsible for any brand-new, needy human beings that might come along. We don't need to learn about self-sacrifice if there's no choice between going out on Friday nights and buying shoes for the kids. We don't know how selfish we are until the baby's crying in the middle of the night, the poop has once again defied both gravity and the diaper, and people are constantly asking, What's for supper tonight?

I know there are those rare couples who, though intentionally childless for a time/at times, are nonetheless amazingly mature and focused not on themselves but on accomplishing good things, even God's things, in the world. But speaking for myself, children have been the wake-up call (an alarm clock that you just can't shut off, actually) out of the selfish immaturity I didn't even know I inhabited. (And I can't help thinking how extra-super-amazing those aforementioned couples would be if they were perhaps a bit more open to God's intentions for marriage and gift of kids!)

But I digress. Back to my furry firstborn: I have lived to repent of the contraception, but not of the plants or dog. Fact is, she's still my only girl! (Though anyone who's had a dog knows that dogs of either sex act more like guys...'nuff said.) Ain't she adorable, though?

And as a side note, this pup of ours is recycled (from the streets of St. Louis via the Humane Society), or, to use one of our favorite household adjectives, "crunchy" (See Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons for a fuller explanation of that). And she in turn recycles--her favorite place to hang out, of course, is under the high chair.

Your kids are so good in church!

People tell me this fairly often. I'm glad if they think this, because most weeks, I disagree. But if it's someone my age saying it, it's usually followed by, "That's why we don't come very often. Ours just won't behave." I want to ask them why they think my kids are good in church. Could it be because I take them, without fail, at least twice every week (once on Sunday, once to the Wednesday night Low Mass which is of course shorter, but without any of those helpful musical breaks to drown out some shouting)? Furthermore, it takes some effort to get them to be good. Most days my "Thanks be to God" is in reference to the wrestling match ending almost as much as it is for all that salvific business. It is tiring to keep a very little person happy enough to be quiet for an hour, and trying at the same time to make it really be church for the older ones (helping them sing, say the Creed, fold their hands, etc.).

Our church doesn't have a nursery, and I don't miss it. I've never understood the parents who perfunctorily bring in their two-year-old for the first 10 minutes and then reward the kid's screaming by taking him to a room full of toys. When we were at a church that had a nursery, I had to leave a lot, but I stood with the offender(s) in the narthex and kept enforcing quietness and church-appropriate behavior. Perhaps this is another reason my kids at least know what's expected of them at church, even if the little sinners can't pull it off all the time. We also sing the liturgical canticles and (if we have our act together enough) the hymn of the day for the upcoming Sunday at bedtime. Yes, my kids are better in church than a lot of kids their age, and it takes work.

Incidentally, this is one thing the big family papists don't get. They've always got a nice pious dad to share the weight on Sunday mornings. My kids' nice pious dad is always delivering a nice pious sermon, so I count on God to provide me with some other nice pious person to help me with the wrangling (which, thankfully, almost always happens on Sunday). Getting a houseful of kids and oneself ready for church with no assistance is a real chore, and then you have act like you're not already completely exhausted at 9 am, and get through the standing and the singing and the shushing. I guess I can't think of a better time to receive the Blessed Sacrament.

A Must-See

National Geographic's The Biology of Prenatal Development DVD is an absolute must-see.

None of that silly stuff about embryos "losing their tails and gill slits."
Just 42 minutes of solid, scientific facts and amazing images from in-utero cameras as well as 3-D ultrasounds.

Get it.
Watch it.
Share it with your friends, your family, your Bible class.
Put a copy in your church library.

This would be an awesome Christmas present, especially for someone who's expecting.

The LCMS inferiority complex WRT its women

In my mailbox yesterday was the Fall issue of Lutheran Forum. I've recovered from the initial ire which one of its articles aroused in me, or at least enough to share my thoughts with an eye toward charity. This article was written by a person with whom I overlapped a bit while I was working on my MA at the seminary. As it happens, this person is female. The article, in my opinion, would be a passable piece of undergraduate work for one of those students who gets A's by working hard without being a great mind--a commendable position, I think, even if it isn't glorious. It contains the kind of puerile pedantry you'd expect from such a student: shallow argumentation, unnecessary information, disregard for well-established counter-positions, and some just plain stupid statements that might have sounded good when you first thought them and arranged them into grown-up sounding words. The article is not something that I would expect to read in Lutheran Forum unless the writer fit a certain profile: an LCMS woman whose paper carries a faint but clear undercurrent of We all know the LCMS is so parochial and silly, and one of these years we'll get women's ordination yet! The reason I'm so annoyed by this is that in another LF issue of recent memory, there was an article which also fit this profile: academically mediocre by discernibly angry LCMS female (who also, as it happens, briefly overlapped with me at the seminary. In all fairness, that issue featured articles by students and the piece I'm talking about ran as such).

The really funny thing is that the current LF issue also contains a note about "Editorial and Confessional Standards," which states among other things, "articles in LF will not contain: pot-shots, thinly veiled contempt, messy thinking . . .". Sorry, friends, but both of the articles described above contained at least two of the things on that list. LF, as a human endeavor, has an agenda. It's edited by a female ELCA pastor. So when they get a submission from a woman in the LCMS who has some academic credentials, however feeble (such as mine), and she's willing to take some subtle little jabs, somehow their high standards for fairness and erudition slip a bit.

The thing is, I know why these two women sent in articles that I pridefully wouldn't want my name on. The seminary would love to put out some really great female academics to help its own political credibility--after all, what kind of academic institution only produces male intellectuals in this day and age? So any female student who can keep from drooling on herself gets treated like royalty (thus being led to believe that she's really as smart as the seminary wants her to be). I know I got this treatment, and I know I didn't deserve it. I'm the person I described up there who can get A's if she works hard, but my time at the seminary accomplished what education should and showed me exactly where I stand: I am not a great mind, and acting like I am makes me look that much stupider. Maybe I could submit a middling article to a periodical that would accept it for political reasons rather than on its theological merits, but then everyone who's actually intelligent would know precisely how middling I am as a scholar. Frankly, I'd rather keep my mouth shut and have them keep thinking I'm smart.

But the LF and the LCMS don't get this, and in their desperation to prove that there are, in fact, female academics in the LCMS (and in the case of LF, that they are as progressive as true intelligence dictates they must be), they keep handing microphones to whatever moderately intelligent female is willing to take them and shout about the undergrad-level insight she's just had (and strangely, it's always that the LCMS needs to let women do more, or some piece of eisegesis on a stale text about women to that effect). In doing so, they make their women look that much stupider since they're always saying something redundant, banal, and totally predictable.

There are veritable female intellectuals and academics in the LCMS. It's just that none of them seem to be interested in arguing for the feminist theological agenda right now. Most of them are too busy working in labs or professing other disciplines. Maybe if the powers that be looked somewhere other than the liberal perimeter for their theology queen, they'd find she's already in their midst. But I wish they wouldn't keep damaging our beloved Synod's own scholarly credibility, and the credibility of their precious female scholars, in their embarrassed meantime.

National Adoption Month

Now, I'm no great fan of the proliferation of National Whatever Month/Week/Day. I didn't even know how many such national "holidays" there were, til our eldest son hit story hour age and suddenly we're learning about National Dental Hygiene Month, National Fire Prevention Week, National Children's Book Week, National Underwater Basketweaving Day. OK, so there never was a story hour on that last one, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's on an official calendar somewhere.

But the fact that November is Adoption Awareness Month brings again to the fore of my mind and heart a topic that's never too far in the background. A strange topic, perhaps, for a blog dedicated to matters relating to personal perpetual parturition, but here it is anyway.

What about adoption?

I'm not talking about the healthy white babies here--there are waiting lists for those, and as God has graciously been pleased to bless us with our own offspring of this variety, I feel no need to stand in those lines.

But what about the babies whose skin or features are different? the kids who have been tossed around U.S. foster care or overseas orphanages for a few years? the ones with health problems? the sibling groups?

Adoption is a beautiful Biblical image of and witness to God's covenantal love for us. Then too, we have the commands to care for the poor, the orphans, the fatherless...

Do we just continue as we are, remaining prayerfully open to God's gift of children whether they be biological or adopted, and assume that He will make clear His intentions for our family?

Just seems like it's hard to be open to adopting when one is in the midst of a young-and-coming family. (Can't you just see the disbelief on the faces of the people at the adoption agencies if my pregnant self marched in, looking not to place a child for adoption but to adopt one?)

As this post is becoming rather long, I'll end it, and hope someone else can step in and add some sense here.

Seven sisters for seven brothers?

Of course, no one knows what will happen. This baby could be my last. But if things keep up for us the way they've been going, we could end up on what I consider the VERY large end of the big family spectrum. Not Duggar-worthy, but possibly Stuckwisch- or even Preus-worthy. I turn 29 this week, which means I could still have a lot of good years in me before I dry up. This seems very funny to me, because when we first tossed our pills and told our families that the number of grandkids was now up to God (my husband's in-church-twice-a-year family shrugged; my extremely pious LCMS relations sucked in their breath sharply and haven't let it out yet), we joked that we were going to have seven kids. Impossible, right? Who has seven kids? Well, me, maybe. Or even a lot more.

The "seven kids" thing has stuck so much with some of my confounded family members that I'm regretting ever saying it. I should have told them 25 so that they wouldn't be fretfully counting down my years of earthly purgatory on their fingers every time I have another one, or advising me to pray for twins so that I'll be done sooner. There is no upper limit here, get it?

My sister (CSPP but not married yet, and my only family member breathing freely since our big announcement) has an explanation I like for when people ask her how many kids she wants: she tells them she'll take as many as God gives her. When the frowning begins immediately thereafter, she says that everyone knows you shouldn't give God a minimum (as if he owes every couple at least one or two kids), so she doesn't see why it would be ok to impose a maximum on him either. So: four, seven, twelve--whatev, man. Time will tell.

Studies in Gender Identity, Part 2

A few observations from our church's recent Beef Supper.

Our 19-month old (boy) was at a highchair opposite a 21-month old (girl).

She: Had food on a large plate on her tray. Food stayed on plate or was consumed, plate stayed on tray. Was not wearing a bib, and finished the meal with nary a spot on her pink-striped sweater.

He: Was, with trepidation, allowed to have a small paper plate, which was promptly dumped, used as a hat, and waved about wildly until confiscated. Was wearing a huge bib, and finished the meal with spots not only on himself but on everything and everyone within throwing radius.

Just different personalities? Or is there some other factor at work here too?

The Things That Are Not

"But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things--and the things that are not--to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him" (1 Cor. 1:27-29).

Anyone else here ever think these words are about us?

The world deems us foolish indeed for using our advanced degrees to spend our days dealing with poop emergencies, negotiating with 3-foot-tall tyrants, and reading "Frog and Toad" books ad nauseum.

Hard to think of many things that seem lowlier, at times, than the relentless daily requirements of perpetual motherhood.

What could be weaker than our helpless newborns?

And I'd venture to say that the vocation of parenthood, and yes, even children themselves (or more than 2.5 of them) are despised in our culture--in deed if not in word.

Not to mention that there are quite a few days when I personally feel like a thing that is not.

All excellent reminders of how God designed this great adventure to "Let him [her!] who boasts boast in the Lord." In Christ alone is "our righteousness, holiness and redemption" (v.31, 30). This foolish, lowly, despised path daily--hourly--humbles me, strips me of my silly pretensions to self-sufficiencey, reminds me that my life is quite simply not about me.

A sigh of relief from Unstructured Play Central

As someone who is too cheap to fork over the cash for a LeapPad and incurably nonplussed whenever someone tells me how well their three-year-old reads/figures/parses/welds/etc., I find this vindicating.

Well?

So where's that World Relief and Human Care study on contraception we've all been so eagerly awaiting? Not that I hold out any hope for it, but I'm still curious. Is it really just taking them this long to say the same smarmy thing they always say ("As for catholic precedent: hey, I think I hear your mom calling. Who's the bioethicist here, mortal? Oh, and Christian Freedom!")? RM, weren't you pestering some of these people for a while? I thought it was supposed to be out by now.