While They Were Sleeping » Paideia

The Trip, Part 1: Hospitality

christina — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 03:15:16 +0000

I’m pretty sure this will take several days to explain, in part since my writing time is now divided by a number of thank-you notes which must be written with all haste.

Which seems like as good a place as any to start. We were very, very blessed by the generosity of friends and strangers on our trip to Fargo, ND, this past week. We were gone from Tuesday morning to the following Tuesday night, and only spent one of those nights away in a hotel. So pending the thank-you notes, here are the people to whom we owe our very awesome, very long trip.

We spent the first night in St. Louis, MO, with Nate, Angela, and John Paul. Craig got to know Nate first in his role as a Catholic blogger (read: “they met on the internet!”) Nate and Angela are in the beginning stages of starting a new Catholic Worker on the other side of town from the long-standing Worker of St. Louis, and as they have kicked most modern communication technology out of their house, we’ve been corresponding with them by snail mail for a couple of months now…mostly about whether they would be interested in allowing us to crash at their house on our way north. Happily, they were willing. We left New Orleans early, arrived in St. Louis in the afternoon, and had a great time having dinner, going to playgrounds, eating frozen custard, and discussing the joys and difficulties of living a holistic Catholic lifestyle. Nate and Angela were leaving on their own road trip the next day, so we were really grateful to them for going out of their way to take us in.

Next we went on to Iowa City, where we stayed with people we actually knew, Mike and Violet and their beautiful daughters Stella and Juniper. They let us stay two nights, so we had time to visit, take the kids to the library, stay up late, and marvel at how peaceful Juniper is at all times. Mike and Violet let us sleep on their mattress. They are awesome. They offered to leave things where they were in case we wanted to stop back there on the way home. Sadly, we didn’t make it back to see them again this trip.

From Iowa City we went on to the original purpose of the trip, a Young Disciples reunion in Fargo, ND. There, again we stayed with strangers, although the arrangements for this “host home” had been made by a friend of ours who used to run the YD program. Josh and Tracy, the young couple we stayed with, provided toys, stairs, and cereal for the girls, as well as a Mary Poppins cup with built in straw. What more could little girls need? We were there Friday and Saturday nights, and had a good reunion and more fascinating theological discussion. That was actually the other theme of the trip.

While we were in Iowa City, Mike and Violet had mentioned the place their friend Brenna was living: a Catholic Worker farm outside of Dubuque, IA. Violet was kind enough to call and see if we could come visit the farm on our way home. And sure enough, they had a space for us. Actually, Brenna gave up her bed so we could stay, and we got in late since we didn’t leave Fargo until almost one and there are no useful interstates in the area, (South Bend and Highway 31, anyone?) and the roosters are apparently on Mountain Time, as they started crowing at four in the morning. But the people of the farm (do I call them Farmers? Workers?) were so hospitable, even though only Brenna knew us from Adam, and she barely so. Craig was feeling down and out by the morning (he didn’t sleep well) and we were offered another night, should we need it. We have several good farm stories now, and Craig is ready to move immediately, and, as usual, we had good food and good conversation and left feeling welcomed and rested (Craig napped through lunch).

So finally we went back through St. Louis, and stayed at a hotel, because even though Nate and Angela had offered us another night at their house, they were getting back from their road trip that same day, and Craig had come down with a cold, and our humility had about run out, so we decided not to impose anymore. And even the lady working at the hotel offered us milk as we were checking in for the tired and grumpy (read: screaming) girls.

Thus the pile of thank-you notes I have to get started on. We have a new standard of hospitality to live up to. We were well cared for on a long trip, one we could not have afforded to make without the generosity of friends and strangers. And I think the best part was, if we had stayed by ourselves in hotels all those nights, trying to get the girls bathed and to bed on time, sleeping until we had to get ready to go, watching TV because there isn’t a whole lot else for a three-year-old to do in a hotel room, we would have missed so much. We would have missed catching up with old friends, we would have missed making new friends and learning a wide variety of new things. The girls would have missed playgrounds, frozen custard, and farm animals, just for starters. I wouldn’t have so many letters to write, which I actually can’t wait to start. Connections we had to people in other places which were tenuous, if they even existed, are stronger now. Our like-minded community, which we keep trying to build a little here and there as we go, has grown tremendously. It might just have been worth the 3,200 miles in the car.

Poor Step-mother! or, Why we don’t watch much TV these days

christina — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:51:35 +0000

We were visiting at Chris’s mom’s house while he and Kelly were in town, and sitting down to white beans and rice with the three of them and Granny, when Lucy raced into the room.

Lucy: “The step-mother is here!”

I start to ask one of those motherly questions which draws out the story behind her pretending, but before I can form the words…

Lucy: “I’m going to kill her!”

And she was gone again. I turned red, shocked, and sent Craig to deal with this. He deals with football players and wrestlers and marine-wanna-bes on a daily basis, after all. Apparently Lucy was protecting her friend, Meadow, from the step-mother, who was going to hurt her.

Thanks, Disney. Non-violent child-rearing takes another set-back. Craig tried to explain, and suggest that she convert the step-mother, but I’m not sure that it sunk in.

Related, or not, Lucy spent a good half hour crying because she didn’t want to take a nap today, which she hasn’t done in months.

Tomorrow – the journey to Fargo begins. Pray for us.

On Waiting

christina — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 12:43:49 +0000

“The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint–virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if the wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. ’Blah blah blah,‘ hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by whole sale desires.”

-Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Thanks for the book, Fr. R.B.!

I think she has a point, don’t you? What do we wait for anymore? Not information, there’s the internet. Not food, there are microwaves. Not TV shows, even: we have DVR. Not letters, a phone call is quicker. Not babies, their ‘delivery’ is scheduled for our convenience or our doctor’s. There does seem to be a pattern.

It wasn’t a VW bus, was it?

christina — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 21:26:05 +0000

“There was a time when good academic qualifications guaranteed a job, but not any more. One reason is academic inflation. In the next 30 years, more people worldwide will be gaining academic qualifications than since the beginning of history. But as more people get them, their currency value is falling sharply. A university degree used to be an open sesame to a professional position. The minimum requirement for some jobs is now a Master’s degree, even a PhD. What next? But there is a second problem. Many companies are facing a crisis in graduate recruitment. It’s not that there aren’t enough graduates to go around; there are more and more. But too many don’t have what business urgently needs: they can’t communicate well, they can’t work in teams and they can’t think creatively. But why should they? University degrees aren’t designed to make people creative. They are designed to do other things and often do them well. But complaining that graduates aren’t creative is like saying, “I bought a bus and it sank”.

-Ken Robinson, Out of our Minds: Learning to be Creative

16-year-olds are people too?

christina — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:09:07 +0000

“There is a natural and accepted view that one of the main purposes of education is to prepare young people directly for a place in the labour market. Obviously, general education should do this. But there are two complications. First, thinking of education as a preparation for something that happens later can overlook the fact that the first 16 or 18 years of a person’s life are not a rehearsal. Young people are living their lives now. What they become and what they do later depends on the attitudes and abilities they develop as they are growing up. Linear assumptions about supply and demand can and do cut off many potentially valuable and formative experiences on the grounds of utility.”

-Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative. (emphasis mine)

Babies and Sisters…

christina — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:26:09 +0000

It’s amazing how kids learn. It’s so totally effortless. There are always the examples of four-year-olds casually using curse words in polite company, much to their parents’ embarrassment, or course. Yesterday, on the other hand, Lucy was walking around the house with her Fish do the Strangest Things book, standing on top of things, holding the book in front of her, and proclaiming, “A reading from Saint Paul. Babies and sisters…” I stopped in my tracks. She is clearly paying much closer attention while she wiggles away through Mass than we have been giving her credit for. (I asked about the “babies”, and she seemed to think that made more sense than “brothers”, which is understandable I guess since she has a severe lack of brothers at the moment.) Anyway, we are redoubling efforts to have such good influences and Saint Paul and his letters around, so that her osmosis can do its thing.

Zoo Trip with Nana

christina — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 01:01:16 +0000

This is Lucy’s first “official” narration. A big part of the homeschooling method we’re looking at is telling back stories the child has heard as well as the story of what happened on a trip, during the day, etc. We went to the zoo today with Craig’s mom today, and here’ is Lucy’s story (which required some prompting, but not too much). Here it is!

“I’ll tell you about the zoo. We went to the zoo. And then we saw the animals. And then we didn’t go see the lions. Abnd then what did we did? Samantha and us and you and mommy and me and Samantha and NaNa. I didn’t want to walk. Because my knee hurt because I got blood because I fell on th ground because I wnet on the mountain on the grass and then I got hurt. Then I got a yellow snowball.”

And here are the pictures…

Gorilla – they were busy today.

Posing by the orangutans.

Samantha’s new friends.

Home Schooling

admin — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:00:48 +0000

We start tomorrow with “official” homeschooling. I thought it would be fun to let grandparents, et alia, follow along, so there is a new page (you should see it at the top under the title) devoted entirely to Lucy’s little projects, my lesson plans, the books were’re reading, and the like.

Before you get too excited about it though, remember that Lucy is only two. So “homeschooling” at this point is going to focus on a letter a week (with themed books, crafts, snacks, etc.), a saint or two a week, and lots of playing and being two. But I’m hoping that getting an early start on the structure (!) of organized (!) home learning will pay off when we get to quadratic equations and the like in a couple of years (kidding, only Craig thinks that will really happen).

So check out the new page, there promises to be plenty of cuteness oozing from it in the weeks to come.

A Spiritual Goal for Women

christina — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:23:38 +0000

Elizabeth Foss uses this quote from Edith Stein in her book:

“The soul of a woman must therefore be expansive and open to all human beings; it must be quiet so that no small weak flame will be extinguished by stormy winds; warm so as not to benumb fragile buds; clear, so that no vermin will settle in dark corners and recesses; self contained, so that no invasions from without can impede the inner life; empty of itself, in order that extraeneous life may have room in it; finally, mistress of itself and also of its body, so that the entire person is readily at the disposal of every call.”

-Essays on Woman, 132-133 (In Real Learning, 210-211)

That should be an aide to personal growth goal setting…

This week’s news

christina — Fri, 08 May 2009 21:23:23 +0000

We are experimenting to see how long we can survive without air conditioning. I’m shooting for Memorial Day. (We will get a respite on Mother’s Day, since Craig’s parents are coming over and I’m not going to impose this penance on anyone else!) We didn’t use it last month, and our electric bill was less than 1/3 of what it had been. We’ve been spending lots of time outside (in the shade mostly!) and leaving the house open for the breeze. It’s not terrible, just a little uncomfortable, and I have a new appreciation for those little breaths of cool air!

One benefit of being outside so much is all the nature we get to see in our own back yard. We found a frog in the laundry closet! Here is a pic, and we have a video of it making its escape, as well, but it’s too big to post at the moment. These are the sort of things I am really, really looking forward to with homeschooling.

My book list on the side has been updated. I’m on a homeschooling binge at the moment, re-reading Elizabeth Foss’s wonderful book, as well as a couple of new ones Craig decided to order from Amazon rather than get from interlibrary loan.

Our seniors are done with school, and we will be, too, at the end of the month. I just have one quiz and exams left to make!! This is all very exciting, and coupled with the encouraging homeschooling reading, is giving me back some of the energy I’ve been lacking lately.

Here are a few more pictures of the girls doing what they do.

Samantha attempting to eat grass.

Lucy drawing. The Easter eggs she made at Grandma’s months ago have been recycled into Easter season decorations (on the wall behind her). Most of them have now been removed and the stickers rearranged again (and again).

Lucy’s block house.

Samantha is teething like a mad woman and enjoys the pieces of Lucy’s puzzle.

Cutting play-doh

Clearly, it’s been a busy week. : )