Who are you people, anyway?

When I think of a big family, I think of a well-oiled machine of wholesomeness. The father is confident and wears respectable slippers around the house. The mother is serene and spins wool from the goats in the backyard into beautiful cloth from which she creates all the family's garments. The homeschooled children have clean, smiling faces (never a strand strays from the girls' braided hair); they all help each other and, when feeling mischievous, giggle together quietly in Sanskrit with great and charming humility. After the older children's double reed ensemble practice, they pose for a photographs on a sunny lawn, then skip off holding hands to churn the week's butter. Obviously this will never be us, which is why I'm usually scowling.

This is not the vision liberals have of big families. I read a book a while back called The Pecking Order. The basic idea was, all parents hate at least one of their kids, so try to keep your reproduction to a minimum so as not to create unnecessary black sheep who will drag society down. One family profiled to illustrate this truth was particularly interesting to me: a nice Lutheran girl married an Orthodox doctor and converted; next thing you know she's alienated from her staunchly occidental community and babies keep crawling out of her body (for a total of seven or eight, I think). The neglected and disconnected children grow into unproductive adult lives of confused listlessness. In other depictions of big families I've come across in liberal writing, maladjusted and uncontrollable kids and feces-smeared walls seem to be obligatory story elements. Vicodin-hoarding mommas with gray skin hide in closets during the brief intervals between the popping out of one urchin and the next (and they're always "popping out"). There are usually lots of molting animals in the house, too, just in case the chimpish children weren't generating enough feces for the walls to be sufficiently smeared.

That's all.

Nonsense of the Day

Since we're on the topic of poetry:

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
And the Monkeys all say Boo!
There's a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots Jibber Jabber Joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang!
And you just can't catch 'em when they do!
So it's Ning Nang Nong!
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning!
Trees go Ping!
The mice go Clang!
What a noisy place to belong,
Is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!

--Spike Mulligan

Now, there are doubtless those who will unjustly accuse me of posting this because it's stuck in my head and I want you to be stuck with it too. But give it a chance: read it aloud a few times, and see if you don't rather start to like it, especially when your two-year-old wanders about the house enthusiastically reciting his own version of it.

Hard-hitting lit? Um, not so much. But occasional silly poems and songs that feature a lively rhythm and foster a love of language? Hey, I'm cool with that. Keep those recommendations coming.

[Source: I came across this in a recent library snag, The Usborne Book of Poems for Young Children. (Book, moderately recommended: It's got some nice RL Stevenson and the like, but also some freaky ones like one about Queen Nefertiti's ghost haunting the town, which I personally find rather too frightening.)]

Children's poetry book, recommended

It's been so long now I can't remember if I was talking to my partners in crime on- or off-blog about this, but I thought maybe somebody else would be interested too so here it is. If you're looking for a poetry book for kids with non-annoying illustrations and a variety of real poems that will hold their attention, try A Child's Book of Poems. We got it as a gift and I give it two thumbs up.

Griping

Anyone ever tried this stuff?

Seems like the 4-month-old still has some kinks in his digestive system. So far as I can tell, his discomfort isn’t linked to my consumption of the usual suspects like dairy, chocolate, etc. And I know, I know: “there’s no ‘normal’” in terms of infant regularity, and “breastfed babies don’t get constipated.” Babies One and Two proved this rule in their own way: One saved everything up for a dramatic explosion or two each week, while Two cleared his system almost hourly. This guy, however, can’t seem to make up his mind. He’ll be moving things right along for a day or two, then take a day off. And on the days he’s not filling the diapers, he seems to writhe more and sleep less.

We tried simethicone drops briefly with One and Two, to no apparent effect. The doc just shrugged when we asked her whether they actually work or not (haven’t asked her about gripe water yet; just came across it the other day). I know that ginger and fennel have long been considered digestive soothers (in fact, my midwife-in-training SIL got me some ginger-based prenatal vitamins that were the only ones I could keep down last time around). So I thought I’d ask whether anyone out there has tried this stuff and to what effect. After all, our readers probably have more collective child-rearing experience than our GP :).

P.S. Ha! I have a new favorite typo. When I went to put the link in, I noticed the following on the site: "Wail a minimum of 30 minutes before repeating dosage, if necessary."

Food dysfunction death match: obesity vs. anorexia

In the interest of keeping it real, I ate an irresponsible amount of ice cream while drafting this.

The press loves obesity and anorexia. Is there anything more perversely fascinating than how other people look, what they eat to make themselves look that way, and how it screws up their lives?

As with everything, it's funny until you have kids. Especially girls (Reb. Mary, your day is coming, DV).

1. We all know overweight kids are miserable. We play outside and don't buy Twinkies, but we never use the f-word because

2. we don't want our daughters to hate themselves and stop eating,

3. and although it doesn't seem like a good idea to tell our kids how beautiful they are all the time,

4. what happens when evil people tell them otherwise (whether directly and personally, or via Disney Princesses)?

Toothpaste

A forgotten basin whispers
of primitive shenanigans:

Around the clogged center
blue globules nuzzle in
slick, primordial dance,
sparkles winking, as they
threaten to evolve.

Pop Exegesis

A friend introduced me to the music of Sara Groves awhile back. I’d never heard of her: she’s a Christian “acoustic pop” artist, and neither pop music nor contemporary Christian music gets much airtime around here. But her CDs (at least the two I have, “Station Wagon: Songs for Parents” and “Add to the Beauty”) make for nice housekeeping music from time to time, IMHO. Here’s the title track of “Add to the Beauty”:



(Excerpted):
Redemption comes in strange places, small spaces
Calling out the best of who we are…
This is grace, an invitation to be beautiful
This is grace, an invitation
Redemption comes in strange places, small spaces
Calling out our best
And I want to add to the beauty
I want to shine with the light
That’s burning up inside.

What I love about this song, aside from its rather poetic definition of grace, is how I can use it for my own purposes to exegete a verse that gets so many people bent out of shape:

Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control. (1 Timothy 2:15)

[Disclaimer: To the best of my knowledge, Groves is neither C nor PP (though to date, she is the mother of 3). Nor does she actually mention the verse in question. So all conclusions drawn here are my own, not necessarily those of the artist, her label, etc., etc.]

Hermeneutic Possibility A: The verse describes how wives/mothers manifest the saving grace that they have received as they persevere in their vocation as Godly wives/mothers. And indeed, we at CSPP find grace, redemption even, in what seems to the rest of the world to be the smallest and strangest of places: the secret world of the womb; the murmur of a nursing newborn. The orderly chaos of a well-used kitchen, the freshness of laundry just off the line. The jumble of shoes in the back hall and the wad of washcloths dripping in the tub. Rocking chairs at midnight; pace-worn floors at dawn. The curve of infant cheeks; the plump competence of toddler fingers; the world through preschool eyes…

Hermeneutic Possibility B: The verse can/should be translated/understood as “she will be saved through THE childbearing” (or so I’ve been told…I’m no Greek scholar). In the strange places of Nazareth and Golgatha, in the small spaces of the blessed Virgin’s womb and the beams of a cross, salvation comes to women, as to all humans.

[Hermeneutic Possibility C: If you’ve dismissed this verse as a typically chauvinistic Pauline statement mandating some sort of evil subjugation of women, or think it means that women who don’t have kids won’t be saved, you’re probably not even reading this blog, or are determined to misread it, so we shall summarily disregard you.]

Now, we could quibble the implications of “calling out the best of who we are” vs. drowning the Old Adam by daily contrition and repentance. But this is True: in unexpected places and overlooked spaces, we receive grace, an invitation to be beautiful—to be conformed increasingly to the startling loveliness of our Lord’s own image.

Consequences

Found some stuff at First Things.

From Editor Joseph Bottum:

Finally, the pope warned that contraception would lead people to picture their bodies as somehow possessions, rather than as their actual being. If a woman can paint her house, then why shouldn’t she get her nose bobbed and her breasts blown up with silicon to the size of beachballs? It’s what men seem to like, after all, and the body is just a thing, isn’t it?

From Mary Eberstadt:

The onslaught of porn,” one social observer wrote, “is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as ‘porn-worthy.’” Further, “sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity. . . . If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.” And perhaps most shocking of all, this—which with just a little tweaking could easily have appeared in Humanae Vitae itself: “The power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time.” This was not some religious antiquarian. It was Naomi Wolf—Third Wave feminist and author of such works as The Beauty Myth and Promiscuities, which are apparently dedicated to proving that women can tomcat, too.

One of two things can form a couple's sexual ethic: the church, or prostitution/pornography. Anyone who doesn't like what the church has to say about chastity and procreation is going to find herself subjected to the whims of a dude (even a husband) whose appetites are determined by a porn-driven world where strippers and hookers set the sexual standards of attractiveness and performance. Take babies out of the sex equation, and anything goes. Many Christian women are forced into humiliating and disgusting appearances, procedures, and acts, because what grounds do they have to say no? It turns him on, and she's his wife.

That alone is worth a marriage's fertility-span spent perpetually parturitional.

Glurk

Baby Dude can glurk. Man can that guy glurk! I shudder to think how much he'd weigh if it weren't for the glurking, considering his percentile of choice. He's sneaky about it too and avoids the burpie by turning his head, or glurking at times far removed from feedings. He seems to find the *splat* sound of glurk hitting the kitchen floor especially satisfying.

So I've had glurk on the brain (and the shirt and the pants and the carpet and the linoleum and the couch and the chair and the sheets) for six months now. My observations have indicated that other people find glurking very offensive, such that they

a) holler, jump up, throw the baby at me, and run for a complete change of clothes immediately upon his glurking on them or merely while being held by them OR
b) refuse flat out to hold the baby out of fear of being glurked upon

Meanwhile, I wear the same glurk-infused pants day after day so as not to drive up laundry costs or wear out my clothes with excessive agitation. Because really, why wear something clean? It will just get glurked on as soon as I pick him up. In fact, my current pants and shirt are both heavily glurked, and I see a spot of it on the carpet that I missed.

Anyway, despite the research cited above which shows glurk to be a terrifying, infectious, and possibly corrosive substance no one ever

a) buys me a present to thank me for the gift I make to society by courageously volunteering to be glurked upon all the time
b)

Actually, I guess a) is all I'm after.

Metronome Mom

So many days, I feel like I’m just marking time, just trying to survive until the relief crew, in the person of Dad coming home from work or the grandparents coming for a visit, arrives. “Survival mode,” as we call it around here, is fine for short bursts—like when there’s a newborn in the house, or the babies are sick, or someone’s going through a particularly unpleasant stage—but hunkering down in the trenches can only last so long before one starts to feel quite cramped (see also: War of Attrition).

In the words of today’s literary allusion: As Janie said to her husband, “You’se always off talkin’ and fixin’ things, and Ah feels lak Ah’m jus’ markin’ time. Hope it soon gits over.” [The first one to name the novel’s title and/or author wins an adventure-filled week with a lively and entertaining toddler: free S&H! Also note: the relationship in the book is dysfunctional and it’s to the general feeling, not the specific situation, that I’m referring. Just so we’re clear.]

“Jus’ markin’ time”…I’ve never heard the expression used in a positive way, but it’s been pinging around my head a lot lately. I Wikipedia-ed the phrase out of curiosity and here’s what I got:

As a military drill command marking time is where soldiers march on the spot. That is, they continue to move their legs as if they were still marching but without moving forward.

The term can also be used to refer to doing a job or task whilst waiting for an opportunity to arise to do what you really want to do.

Indeed. But then I got to thinking about the musical meaning of the term. Middle school band directors (and their even braver cousins, elementary school recorder teachers) know that in a crowd of inexperienced “musicians” who are trying to find and keep their place and stay in tune and on key, someone’s got to mark time, to keep the beat. Or else the whole venture will degenerate into riotous, painful, shrieking dissonance. More experienced musicians can count for themselves, but they still watch for that all-important downbeat and the occasional cue.

Ah. So maybe the time-marking moments of motherhood aren’t so useless as they sometimes seem. Household harmony and rhythm don’t just happen.

And hey, the military connotation isn’t such a bad one either, for those of us who are training the next generation of Christian soldiers. (And we’ve had not a few parades around the house to that hymn lately; it’s the boys’ current favorite.) Endless drilling precedes battle-readiness, if there’s to be any hope of victory.

So march on, Metronome Moms!