Old Stuff

We win

"The breeders shall inherit the earth." -- Mark Shea

Closing tomorrow

Thanks, Saint Joseph! Click the picture for a larger view of our new house, and see this page for recent pictures of our kids. Anyone have a link to any of the Latin hymns to Saint Joseph?

Thanksgiving

I've dodged a bullet and received a small cross that's responding well to antibiotics. Not bad for a two-day stay in the hospital.

Last Thursday morning I drove to the local emergency room after an insistent and frightening pain settled in the center of my chest. I'll spare you all the adventures and just note that tests revealed it wasn't a heart attack; if it happens again the first step will be a full gastrointestinal workup.

While lounging around in the hospital I picked up a nasty case of cellulitis on my left leg. Cellulitis is a strep or staph infection of the skin that in rare cases turns into the famous "flesh-eating bacteria" malady. While I suppose I wouldn't mind having a shiny new plastic leg, I'm grateful that this stuff is responding well to cephalexin.

The best part of the whole stay was that my roommate wasn't a TV person! The damned TV wasn't on even once until I was packing up to leave Friday night and his son wanted to watch some "game" in which big guys skate around an ice rink and punch each other. Aside from phone calls, nurse visits and friendly comments back and forth, a delicious silence filled the room and allowed for some fruitful prayer and reading.

Make a new plan, Stan

• read the daily Mass readings
• pray the Rosary
• read The Imitation of Christ
• work in bits of the Liturgy of the Hours when I can

Prayer requests

Please pray for an 18-year-old girl whom Lisa took to a shelter last night. According to her, her father kicked her out of his house when she turned 18 recently, she's been homeless now and then during the last four years, and she may be a few weeks pregnant.

The girl arrived in our neighborhood a couple of days ago when she met one of our new neighbors at the local police station. She was there to inquire about women's shelters when our new neighbor, there to report a case of homosexual pedophiliac incest that has reportedly proven to be false, invited her to stay with them. Now that the girl has spent a few days with that psychotic manipulative liar and her freakshow family, she asked us to help get her out of there.

Meanwhile, also please pray for the said psychotic liar who moved in a couple of weeks ago, for her apparently unjustly-accused husband, her retarded, disabled and epileptic stepson, and for the young drug dealer who just moved out of the apartment next to ours. Oh, and don't forget Renee and Danny. Thanks to their lack of parental supervision, they've been drawn into the neighbor's freakshow.

To quote Father Joseph Fessio,

...in the new Dark Ages every home must be a monastery. Every home must be a place of refuge. It won't be summa quies, as I'm sure people who are families here will tell me; nevertheless it will be a certain repose from the hectic noise, promiscuity and violence of the world. It will definitely be that. It will be a sanctuary, a holy place.

Gravy Crockett

They ate it! I put beef on their plates and they ate it! Our two older kids have a mysterious and troubling aversion to beef, even though they'll gobble up bacon and sausage by the pound. Last night I finally found a beef dish they'll eat: "Gravy Crockett", christened by our son after one of his knock-knock jokes.

Gravy Crockett

Cover the bottom of a skillet with oil and preheat it to about 200-250 degrees. Meanwhile, mix:

• 1 pound of hamburger
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup of grated Parmesan cheese
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup of bread crumbs (that canned stuff)
• 1 egg
• a few teaspoons of minced garlic
• 1/4 cup of parsley
• a few splashes of lemon juice
• 1/2 teaspoon of salt
• some pepper

Mix it together with your hands, then form 6 or so patties & fry them gently in the oil. Not too hot or you'll burn the parsley and garlic.

Once those are done, remove them and saute half an onion, minced, and some mushrooms in the oil for a few minutes. Drain that and add two cans of cream of mushroom soup, a few spoonfuls of cream cheese and about a cup of milk & stir diligently til the cream cheese melts. Turn down the heat and return the cooked patties to the gravy to let things blend while you finish the other meal preparations.

Good luck!

Declaration of war

Mayor Samwise hits the nail on the head over at the Southfarthing Soapbox:

A father is truly at war with the world for the souls of his children. Michael Obrien's book Plague Journal comes to mind. Am I a pessimist because I cannot forsee anything but the further breakdown of our society at every level? Or am I a realist? The nation is splitting. The cultural divide is becoming a chasm and all common ground is disapearing. When it is truly the case that all common ground between two groups has been eliminated, what recourse is left but war of one form or another? The constitution was designed to rule a religious and virtuous people, a people united in certain ideals; liberty, independence, virtue, and leisure as it is explained by Joseph Pieper -- the philosophical act. The American mainstream has abandoned these ideals, and moved outside of the mindset assumed by the constitution. Is it any wonder that this document is re-interpreted to the point of absurdity? It is wholly foreign to them!

The act of forming a Christian marriage is a declaration of war. Those that enter into such a union understanding it in its classical context are inavoidably at odds with nearly all of American mainstream; They formalize their intention not to be sexually reckless -- to conceive and bear children -- to educate and catechize those children. Consider to what degree they must remove themselves from the mainstream to do these things. To have half a chance of providing the upbringing their station demands one of them effectively abandon their career. If they do not further alienate themselves by homeschooling, they surely will have to remove their children from the social reengineering classes mandated by the NEA. Some Catholic schools are safe but many -- like the one I attended -- are full of bitter feminists, who are probably more dangerous in that they are still teaching distortend religious ideas, while the public schools have abandoned spirituality altogether. Think about the movies, television shows, magazines, etc that they shield their children from -- most of "pop" culture will not sell to them. Christian families are an economic and ideological threat.

The divide widens, and the board begins to be set for a severe conflict. It may be a war. It may be an emmigration. It may be the apocalypse. Be optimistic about humans if you will, but do not try to appease the devil. Its perilous to speak to dragons.

The apocalypse continues

That's "apocalypse" as in revelation or unveiling - when you have kids the world begins to reveal itself.

As I browsed through our hometown's new public library yesterday, I wandered through the open door of the magazine room, secluded by rows of bookshelves in the back of the library. What do you think I found down at a seven-year-old's eye level? The October issue of Cosmopolitan, which is apparently a porn magazine for teenage girls (or perhaps for women who have the maturity of teenage girls).

A middle-school-aged girl wandered into the room as I was browsing though the magazine's "101 Fabulous Sex Tips", so I threw the thing in the trash. Guess whose children won't be wandering around the library unaccompanied for the next decade?

Be what you are

Consider Renee & Danny (not their real names), an 8-year-old girl and her 6-year-old brother, two kids in our apartment complex neighborhood. They began playing with our kids this summer while the local public schools were on vacation. We quickly established, in response to their insistent questions, that:

• Lisa and I are married,
• we've never been married to anyone else
• all four of our kids belong to Lisa
• they simultaneously belong to me
• they all were born after we got married
• I live with Lisa all the time

They greeted each of these discoveries with poorly-disguised astonishment.

Renee and Danny may have different biological fathers; they have another "father" who has divorced their mother, has remarried, and whose step-daughters socially torture Renee when she visits them; they have another "father", or "he will be soon!", who is their mother's current live-in boyfriend.

Renee, who is in third grade at the local public school, can barely read and is a habitual liar. She doesn't lie maliciously, because she literally doesn't know better. As far as she knows, you say anything to make yourself appear to be something besides what you are. This is normal for kids whose families have committed suicide by divorce. She's ignorant of every aspect of life beyond Mom's boyfriends, spats with other 8-year-old-girls, and the fornication, mutilation and snuff films she sees on cable TV. Danny, the 6-year-old, is on track to become a sexual predator and is under the closest surveillance when he visits us.

Her friends, her parent(s) and the parents of her friends are no different. There's an entire anti-culture out there consisting of 20- and 30-something parents whose families committed suicide a couple of decades ago, whose own families have committed suicide, who neglect their children, who couldn't care less where their kids are during the day or evening as long as they're not underfoot at home, who have no interest in life beyond jobs, bills, TV and fornication.

Lisa and I and the kids, simply by being what we are, are flooding these children with the only spiritual life they've ever known.

Abortion pictures

What's your take on anti-abortion folks using pictures of dead mutilated babies as pro-life propaganda? As I was visiting People for Life a moment ago (it's currently safe to visit the front page) I clicked on a link that led to pictures of acid-burned, mutilated babies murdered by abortionists.

Having cuddled and kissed a 20-week "fetus" - our daughter Helen - for a couple of hours, I can't begin to put into words how disturbing the pictures were. Disturbing in a "how dare you" sort of way. It seems to me that use of these pictures as propaganda shows a lack of... something. A failure in reverence, this use of dead babies' bodies, however noble the cause.

Your two cents? How do you approach this?

What damnfool idiot dreamed this up?

In Cleveland (and only in Cleveland),

At the sign of peace, there is a tendency now at churches to shake hands with several nearby people. The new rite encourages people to embrace one or two people in a serious, sober gesture of reconciliation.

"The meaning of the sign of peace is not hail fellow, well met," Murray said. "It is a rite of reconciliation, of unions of minds and hearts."

Supposing I lived in Cleveland (pause to give thanks) - now I'm supposed to hug that tanned teenybopper in her latest Abercrombie & Fitch bra & thong outfit? Someone please hit that bishop over the head with a friggin' clue hammer.

The number 1 killer of women

One of the regular visitors to this here blog works at a hospital in southern New Hampshire. I just visited their website and found a link to the American Heart Association: What does the #1 killer of women look like?

I figured it had something to do with the Lifetime network, which is seemingly required to present the murder of at least one woman in each show they broadcast, but no, it's an informative page about the symptoms of heart disease. It's an great website - we've recognized lots of the symptoms from my wife's recent experiences.

Why not visit the page now to assess your risk of heart disease?

Prayer request

Back in May my wife had a difficult delivery. After being anesthetized for an emergency c-section, her larynx closed during intubation. They worked on that problem for a few frantic minutes, then decided to reverse the anesthesia with drugs and do a spinal block. Her larynx opened after she woke up, and the surgery proceeded very quickly after that. During the time her larynx was closed, she and the baby were without oxygen.

A few weeks later she had what seemed to be a small stroke with temporary right-side numbness and paralysis, and since then she's had occasional short migraines that sneak up and stab her in the head. Since all this started, her once-mighty short-term memory has degraded to, say, the level of mine.

She's had a CT scan and lotsa blood tests, and Thursday morning she's scheduled for a head and neck MRA, an echocardiogram and sundry other small stuff. If you have a moment during the day, how about a quick Ave?

UPDATE: Thanks! Y'all are just like the folks on our homeschooling email list (hi, Ellyn). The tests went well and the MRA even went faster than expected. Now we just hang out and wait for the doctors to make something of it all (we hope).

It's for us and them

Something to listen for ...

It seems that many commentators are, in the main, saying one of two things about marriage in light of the last week's news items. Some say that marriage is for the spouses, an arrangement or institution for them.

Others say that it's for the spouses, and also for the children that result from their union. The latter commentators know what's up, and they're the ones I listen to more closely. They include Francis Cardinal George and Rush "there's hope for him yet" Limbaugh.

And by the way, Cardinal George also knows the score:

Marriage predates our present government or any other and predates, as well, the founding of the Church. Marriage is not the creature of state or church, and neither a government nor the church has authority to change its nature. A government that claims such authority becomes totalitarian.

Seems as though the sky is growing dark and the wind is picking up. Have the last few decades been the calm before the storm?

In praise of insurance

Just received a wad of EOBs (explanation of benefits) in the mail today: $31,240.01 in charges for the baby's delivery and her and my wife's hospitalization, all paid at 100%. Whew.

Speaking of child expenses, my wife went to the grocery store recently to get milk and some other staples. In the dairy aisle, where we routinely buy three gallons of milk at a time for our growing and thirsty brood, my wife happened to catch a young pregnant mother's moment of illumination. The girl looked at our milk-laden shopping cart, looked at her belly, looked at her husband, and whispered, "Oh my God - she has THREE gallons of milk!"

I suppose in 10 years we'll be buying three gallons a day.

Twice as hot for half as long

Kathy the Carmelite wonders how a pizza can be both burnt and raw simultaneously.

Once upon a time, one of my roommates, a physicist, was hungry but didn't have much time to cook. Being a healthy sort of guy, he decided to bake one of those little frozen pot pies. Being in a hurry, and necessity being the mother of invention, he quickly formulated a new theory of cooking: one can cook a pot pie twice as hot for half as long, and all will be well. He promptly set out to test his theory. And he's a physicist.

Minutes later he removed the pot pie from the oven and instantly, involuntarily threw it across the kitchen - the crust was so hot his body went into life-saving mode and got it the hell away from him. A quick post-mortem of the pie's charred remains revealed that the inside was still frozen.

To shop or not

On shopping for a parish. Sigh. The parish in whose territory we live is a fine small-town parish with a good number of vocations and a growing Hispanic population, and the priest is as good and faithful as any in this marvelous diocese. Problem: when I hear the cheezy electronic keyboard accompanying a jaunty "Ollie Ollie Ollie - Loo Ooh Yuh", it's like a fluttering red cape to a bull. Yeah, I should get over it, but until I do I'll worship there in an oppressed rage.

That's one reason why just this week we've moved to a different parish. It has a fully developed path of formation for children, including an excellent K-8 school in case we decide to stop homeschooling, and it worships in the most sublimely beautiful church in the diocese. As the pastor said yesterday, all that beauty doesn't really matter - when he was in Korea they were happy to celebrate Mass anywhere - and yet it does matter.

Have you shopped for parishes?

Now that's an urgent web search

You should probably call 911 in this situation: 31 weeks pregnant and contractions 2 minutes apart

Meet the Beetles

Last night we captured a beetle named Jeff the Pyralis Firefly. He's distinguished from the Pennsylvania firefly by his yellow light; the Quaker State beetles have a green light. We know he's a boy because he was captured in flight; the girls of the species don't fly. Care and feeding is easy, since there's no feeding: adult fireflies don't eat. Firefly larvae eat small animals such as slugs and snails. Jeff is incarcerated in a sippy cup on our kitchen table, and the wardens were discussing his release at breakfast this morning. If clemency is shown, he'll be released at night since he's nocturnal.

Gethsemane

Please remember in your prayers today a private intention of ours that brings to mind Christ's words in the garden of Gethsemane:

[35] And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. [36] And he said, "Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what thou wilt."

Godlike redux

Here's the Chesterton quote I mentioned a couple of weeks ago:

...the girls are always doing something, pleasant or unpleasant. In fact, when they have not to do something unpleasant, they deliberately do something else. A great part, perhaps the more godlike part, of a boy's life, is passed in doing nothing at all. Real selfishness, which is the simplest thing in the world to a boy or man, is practically left out of the calculation. The girls may conceivably oppress and torture each other; but they will not indulge or even enjoy themselves -- not, at least, as men understand indulgence or enjoyment.

From Chesterton's review of Louisa Alcott's novel Little Women in his A Handful of Authors, pp. 163-167; included in Fr. Alvaro de Silva's Chesterton anthology Brave New Family.

New military hardware

Yesterday the kids rearranged the cushions on the living room couch and dubbed it a "Couch 15 Apache". Cool kids. My son's favorite airplane is the F-14 Tomcat, an attractive plane but rather boxy and old-fashioned nowadays. My favorite is the venerable F-4 Phantom, a huge, heavy but truly beautiful plane.

After all these years

My wife and I have been married for seven years; we've known each other for eight. Just last week we discovered that we both like flavored potato chips. All these years we've been buying plain chips... sigh.

He never knew what hit him

Tom over at Disputations had a good post on preparation for death that prompted a bit of reflection over here. It's commonplace to hear someone attempt to comfort the family of a person who has died, "He never knew what hit him," "It happened so suddenly he didn't feel a thing."

Deeply horrifying, that. I'm hoping for a long slow death full of the preparation Tom recommends. Come to think of it, I've been dying since the day I was conceived (at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, as I recently learned from my Mom 8^O), so I suppose I ought to get off my lazy *ss and start preparing now :-)

OK. My wife just read this and the Mayo Clinic bit surprised her. I came along after my parents had been married for seven years, so she wondered whether they were there for infertility treatment. No, that was the trip in which my Dad was finally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and apparently they had some free time together :-)

Ahem.

Converts! Get yer converts!

Gerard Serafin came up with quite an impressive list of converts to the Faith. While we're out of place in such distinguished company, I'll also have to list my wife and me. She received the Sacraments at the Jubilee Easter, and I returned to the Church in 1991, having been removed to various Protestant precincts at age 6.

A homily by an old retired holy priest on Corpus Christi 1999 was the last straw for her, and the prompting was confirmed by a locution she heard during Eucharistic adoration a short while later.

I began my return the night after a relative's funeral Mass in 1988; the ground had been prepared by study of classical European civilization at the University of Illinois under professors Richard Scanlon (the toga'd Prophet of Illini Victory, now retired and a deacon) and Joel Relihan. I then read myself into the Church.

Vacation

Little or no blogging ahead - I'll be on vacation til June 30. We'll be in Indianapolis on Wednesday, and I may run down to St. Meinrad's Thursday to check out their music for the Liturgy of the Hours. As for the retreat I had planned, June 22-28 is the one week during the year that the guesthouse is closed for maintenance :-)

If you're ever in downtown Indy, you should check out Krieg Brothers Catholic bookstore. It's on Meridian just a block or two south of the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument. If you're in Indy this summer, beware the Hyperfix.

Homecoming

Our new baby girl came home from the hospital yesterday! Thanks to all who have prayed for us in the last few months.

She's been in her cradle only once so far. Seems we'd rather sit and hold her all day :-) The other kids, 6, 4 and 17 months, are very happy to have her around, and our 17-month-old son is fascinated by her. He takes time to stop and pay attention to her and does small unselfish things - pats her foot gently or rubs her hand or nose, or just sits on the arm of the chair and looks at her with a goofy smile. La vita è bella!

Baby update / the NICU encyclopedia

Regular ultrasound scans of our daughter's brain have revealed a small spot in one of the ventricles. The spot was still there in yesterday's scan so her doctor ordered a CT scan, which showed that all is well. If there had been an intraventricular hemorrhage, it caused no damage and it's resolving itself.

She also had a barium swallow X-ray yesterday, which showed no abnormalities in her esophagus and stomach. Good God, the barium cocktail reeks when it comes out the other end!

Newborn Intensive Care: What Every Parent Needs to Know is a marvelously comprehensive guide to what can happen in a neonatal intensive care unit. One of the pediatric physical therapists at the hospital gave us a copy of the book yesterday (which generosity depends on this year's availability of grant money), and it has helped us understand what's going on and what to really worry about (not that worrying does any good, but it's gonna happen anyhow).

Jeff, the European caterpillar hunter

The kids found a fiery searcher yesterday in the front yard and named it Jeff. According to the Audobon Field Guide to Insects and Spiders (one of today's purchases at Barnes & Noble), it's a European Caterpillar Hunter. The European beetle is distinguished from its pedestrian American cousin by its longer antennae and a deep blue lustre on its legs.

Meanwhile, I'm fighting off the willies every time I page through the insect book. I've managed to peek at the spider section only once - damn they're ugly! As for me and my house, spiders are for smashing. Yes, they're "good" in that they eat predatory insects, yadda yadda yadda. Smash 'em. No snakes allowed, either. I'm the Dad, them's the rules.

Happy birthday to me...

I'm 37 today. I was born on the feast of Corpus Christi in 1966, so I also have a second movable celebration in addition to the one today.

Random notes on turning 37:

• we had three doctors appointments today
• as I was leaving for work this evening, my 6 year old son said, "Happy birthday, Daddy!" That was so good I had him say it again :-)
• I've grown lots of gray hairs in the last year
• Mom still calls me at 11:08 a.m. every June 9 (good thing I wasn't born in the middle of the night)
• books books books

A promised retreat

Back during the last few days of her pregnancy, my wife suggested I take a weekend's retreat after the baby arrived and everything settled down. Apparently the stress was getting to me - the kids were learning new words and I haven't smoked so much since 1995.

So now I'm calmly anticipating a weekend at Saint Meinrad Archabbey in sourthern Indiana. I've been waiting patiently for years to get to their bookstore and buy all the music they've written for the Liturgy of the Hours, and now the opportunity draws near. My friend Mark, our new daughter's godfather, went on retreat there just before his wedding and he highly recommends it.

Hm. About 90 percent of the sentences I write have a first phrase or thought (pause) then I think of something else and tack it on the end. Does that grate on anyone else's nerves like it does mine?

Baby update in the works

My wife and I are going to visit our baby daughter today. She's back in a regular bed, and the only remaining problems are her episodes of erratic heart rate, resp rate and blood oxygen level while feeding. Our first child had the same problem while he was in the NICU six years ago.

A few days ago we had a tornado warning while I was visiting her. We had to evacuate the NICU, so once everyone was moved to an interior room in the hospital I got to hold her for an hour and a half and help her finish a feeding. Good stuff.

Prayer request

Our daughter's heart rate, breathing rate and oxygen saturation haven't stabilized, so she's back in a warmer to stabilize her temp, she's receiving oxygen again (but only 30%), there's a problem with phlegm in her lungs and she's now on a couple of antibiotics. They're don't know what's causing the problems yet; results from a blood culture are due back tomorrow afternoon. If you have a moment, would you please pray for her? Thanks!

Baby update

She's doing wonderfully well! She weighed exactly 2kg this morning and she's been moved to a regular bed in the NICU. Her first bed was a big gee-whiz affair that helped regulate her temperature and contained special lights used to fight jaundice. The only thing keeping her in the hospital now is a recurring bout of rapid breathing that makes it difficult for her to bottle feed. Once that clears up, she's outta there!

I got there tonight in time for her 8pm feeding, and also took her temp and changed her poopy diaper. Then we settled down in a rocking chair with a bottle of formula, but she was too sleepy to take much - only 7cc out of 35. We sent the rest in through a tube that's snaked through her nose and into her stomach. We snuggled together for about 90 minutes and, aside from singing "her song", Regina caeli, we sat in silence. She'll get plenty of noise when she goes home, but I hope our times together at night can be quiet.

Thanks for praying!

It would seem that...

Protestant children memorize Scripture, while Catholic children memorize prayers.

babynames.pl

We've chosen a name for our new daughter, but I'm reluctant to publicize it on the web. This little quickie helped:

babynames.pl

Gloria in excelsis Deo!

Our new little girl was born at about 4:45 this morning by C-section. She weighed 3 lb 6 oz and was 16 inches long, and she's ruddy with curly black hair like 1yods, not fair and blond like 6yods and 4yodd.

Her heart rate kept dropping through the night and the abruption progressed so dw's dr. decided it was best to deliver and grow in the NICU. The baby was intubated just after birth, she's on a ventilator (down to 30% O2 tonight) and is receiving blood transfusions. She's doing really well; if that continues she should be released in a few weeks.

She was baptized this afternoon in the NICU by one of our parish priests. It was beautiful.

Dw is having a hard time. This C-section has affected her much more that the previous one. She had a lot of pain and bleeding this morning until she was switched from something-or-other to morphine. With that, she has a hard time staying awake. She was ordering supper this evening and fell asleep a half dozen times during the phone call. She gathered enough strength to make a trip into the NICU to see the baby and we had a good visit for 15 minutes or so.

We don't have a name for the baby yet since she took us by surprise. I hope we can work more on that tomorrow.

Thanks for praying!

Nice work if you can get it

Wolfram Research rocks. They've generously supported us through all our pregnancies and have "literally bent over backwards" (to quote Jimmy Swaggart :-) to accomodate my scheduling nightmares during my wife's hospitalizations and lengthy stretches of bedrest. If you're looking for the sort of job described here, why not apply? It's a magnificent place to work, and the "Silicon Prairie" of central Illinois is a great place to live.

No, I don't get paid to say this.

Jailed!

My wife will be hospitalized for the rest of the pregnancy, which we hope will run another 4 or 5 weeks. Full term would be 9 more weeks, but there's very little chance of that for a variety of reasons. Tests this morning indicated pregnancy-induced hypertension and an unseen abruption, and her obgyn (a friend of ours from our parish) is playing it safe - she said my wife has "been jailed."

Thanks for praying!

Update

Last night's news: my wife's contractions have stopped and her blood pressure is under control; they'll decide whether to release her today based on various tests to be run this morning. When she is released, she'll be on bedrest for the rest of the pregnancy. We're hoping for at least 5 more weeks. Thanks for praying!

This morning's news: the contractions have stopped and my wife has been taken off magnesium sulfate; that will require 24 hours observation to be sure she comes off it OK. The fetal monitor picked up the baby's hiccups last night. Last steroid shot was this morning, no more for the rest of the pregnancy!

A friend of ours is coming over this afternoon to watch our kids while I spend the afternoon with my wife and pop into work for a bit.

Update

Things are looking a bit better this morning. My wife's blood pressure is under control with magnesium sulfate, and the contractions are about 90 minutes apart. Thanks for praying!

Prayer request

My wife is 31 weeks pregnant and began having contractions this morning. We waited a couple of hours then decided to head to the hospital since they weren't subsiding. They've started her on a medication to settle the contractions and get her blood pressure back under control, and they plan to keep her there for a couple of days.

Please pray for the safety of my wife and the baby, and that the pregnancy continue to closer to the recommended 40 weeks. Please also pray for me and the other kids - I've been terribly short-tempered with them today.

This wasn't completely unexpected - our pregnancy history is kinda wacky:

• 6yods: placenta previa, placental abruption, IUGR, born at 30 weeks & 2lb 5oz, NICU for 6 weeks
• 4yodd: placenta previa, placental abruption, preeclampsia, born at 36 weeks
• 3yodd: sickness entire pregnancy, preeclampsia, miscarriage at 20 weeks (she survived long enough to receive the Sacraments; thus, you may pray for the intercession of St. Helen White)
• 1yods: placental abruption, 4 months bedrest, gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, born at 38 weeks
• Baby: gestational diabetes, preterm labor

Update: 10:31 p.m., the contractions are about 1/2 hour apart despite the magnesium sulfate, and they've begun a four-dose course of steroid injections 12 hours apart to help develop the baby's lungs in case labor progresses. Back in 1996 we had a 10-dose course of a different steroid in a similar situation - and I had to administer the injections! By all accounts it hurt me more than my wife :-)

How to design a firing range

The Army Corps of Engineers' manual on INS-style firing range design. If we ever wind up with a home in the country, I'd like to build a backyard firing range.

There's more to these hobbits than meets the eye

One of the gentlehobbits down in Southfarthing, in fact the venerable Mayor Samwise himself, has taken offense at my calling certain human beings "products". This is encouraging! Would that more people would find it offensive.

To clarify a bit: yes, I agree that the hypothetical products of the industrial process described in the Washington Post would be fully human. Yet, the process itself makes of the human person a manufactured product of an industrial process. Fully human, of course, and yet a product. For more on this idea of human beings as products, see Reflections on Cloning from the Pontifical Academy for Life.

Even though the Academy's document is concerned with cloning, not the specific technique described in the Post, it is still a moving meditation on the "production" of human beings.

Recall the Creed: Christ is "begotten, not made." Every human being should have the privilege and dignity of having been begotten, not made.

Special for parents

Nârwen points us to a thing in the Washington Post about a recent development in stem cell research. According to the Post, this technique could, in theory, allow the manufacture of a child whose parents are two men or two women. In passing, it's interesting to note that the Post advertises this technique as one of special interest to "gay men."

Presuming that the product of such a manufacturing process were fully human, physically healthy and capable of reproduction, here's a question for parents: should your child marry one of these products (assuming that a full and valid marriage is intended, complete with ordinary sexual reproduction)? Whether yes or no, on what do you base your answer?

Hey hey, holy mackerel!

Some of my earliest memories are of watching the Chicago Cubs and Chicago Bears on TV with my Dad (+ 1988), and back then (1969, I was 3 years old) the Cubs' theme song was "Hey Hey, Holy Mackerel." If you're a Cubs fan of a certain age, that bouncy tune is now stuck in your head. Many thanks to Therese Z for the lyrics!

Hey, hey, holy mackerel,
no doubt about it,
the Cubs are on their way!

The Cubs are gonna hit today
they're gonna pitch today
they're gonna field today
come what may,
the Cubs are gonna win today!

Hey, hey holy mackerel
no doubt about it
The Cubs are on their way

They've got the hustle
they've got the muscle
the Chicago Cubs are on their way!!!

The wisdom of innocence

"If grass could run, then cows would look more like lions."" --my 4 year old daughter, a few moments ago.

Today's lesson: soldiers are good guys

Today's lesson: soldiers are very kind to us; they're very mean to the bad people. I have no idea where 4yodd got the notion that soldiers are bad people; if I find out I'll expurgate that source completely. She says she saw bad soldiers in Africa when she was two years old, but I kinda doubt that - she hasn't been east of North Carolina :-) Transcribed just now as we discussed the situation:

"What else do you know about soldiers?"

"Well, they could tie the bad people who fight us into ropes, then they could not fight us. That's a good one. They could give us all the food they want us to have. They don't fight us and they would give us all they want us to have."

Rationing? We haven't discussed the war or ready.gov stuff, so I don't know where she's coming up with the food ideas.

"Daddy, why are the soldiers nice to us and bad to the bad people fighting us?"

"Because they love us."

"What happens if there were lots of soldiers here?"

"We would give them some nice hot meals, and we would tell them funny stories, and we would play games with them."

"Do soldiers have houses in their states?"

"Yes, because they're people just like us. Some of them have little girls just like you - they're daddies."

"Are some soldiers girls?"

"Yes."

"Then if they were big and a girl soldier, she would be a mommy soldier. Do soldiers sleep at night or sleep at day?"

"They like to sleep at night, but sometimes they have to be up all night."

"Does that make them tired?"

"It sure does. Sometimes they get very tired."

Wednesday in review, so far

3am-4am: adoration at St. Matt's. Slogged through the office of readings, then slept like a log. The sound of the door opening at 4am woke me up.

4:15-6am: work. Of course, my machine slows down when I'm trying to wrap things up. Oh - updatedb thinks this is a good time to run. kill -9.

6:30am-7am: a 3-cigarette drive home. I never fall asleep when I drive with a lit cigarette.

7am: 6yods has improved, call to cancel 8am appointment. 80% because he's better, 20% because I'm bushed. Maybe I can lay down. Oh. There's a mouse in the kitchen. Little bastard is crawling around on the @##$$#@! counter. To IGA to get mousetraps. Come home, try to set the damn things. Pieces of shit. Call Rural King - yay, they open at 7am.

I love Rural King. The staff is helpful - "Do you have glue traps for mice?" "Sure, aisle 30, right side toward the back!" First, get a bag of free popcorn from the high school basketball game style popper, then wander over to aisle 30. Good God, the rat traps are huge. Glad I'm not a farmer. Browse through the rat and mouse aisle of death & finally pick out 2 4-packs of mouse glue traps. They're Muy Fuertes or something. Very Fiery? Super Strong, says the U.S. side of the package.

I'm at Rural King, so I have to get something for the kids. Pass things you put on horses, a little fridge with stuff you inject into pigs, hey! the toys have been moved. Wander around, there they are. Got a little plastic cow and calf for 4yodd and a little Matchbox-style ATV for 6yods. One thing I really love about Rural King: this aisle has toys, the next aisle has ammo. Rural King is also your local supplier of red fox urine, which I'm told is useful when you're hunting wild animals.

Do dogs really like to chew on pigs ears? There's a Godawful-huge bin of brown dried pigs ears at Rural King.

From the east side of town to the west - I must get cash and buy breakfast. Mcdonald's for 2 smeg meals - yes, that's what the employees call the sausage mcmuffin with egg - and 2 hotcakes & sausage meals. Zip back home on the east side, screw the friggin' mouse, let's eat. Kids are pleased with their Rural King treats. The ATV is variously named Four X Four, Jeffrey and Populars (beats me, too), the cow is "Sally, because it's a cow, a girl" and the calf is Kit. Sleep.

The week in review

I have to write this down now or I'll never remember it all.

dw = dear wife
1yods = 1-year-old dear son
4yodd = 4-year-old dear daughter
6yods = 6-year-old dear son

Sunday morning and afternoon

No memory of this at all. I may have been awake.

Sunday evening

Shower & get ready for Mass at Holy Cross; drive 1/2 hour to Champaign, arrive on time.

Mass 5:30-6:30pm

Work, 6:45pm-4am Monday

Monday morning

Nap 4am-6am on the couch in the frontend department

Work 6am-7am

1/2 hour drive home, breakfast, take 1yods to doctor: deep cough and a rough Sunday night that had dw up with him all night. 1/2 drive back to Champaign. Doctor says its something between bronchitis and pneumonia (I can't remember the name), prescribes Albuterol and an antibiotic (the usual one, I can't remember the name).

Drive 1/2 back, work in kitchen and watch the kids while dw naps.

Monday afternoon

Dw heads in to work (Catholic bookstore 3 afternoons a week). 1yods can't sleep unless he's upright on my lap, so we occasionally doze on the couch. 6yods and 4yodd are sedated with favorite videos.

Monday evening

On Monday evenings, dw has an hour of eucharistic adoration from 7pm to 8pm. I cooked supper: spaghetti, a bland Ragu "traditional" sauce I won't buy again, and some yummy meatballs I fixed & refrigerated recently. Played with the kids until dw arrived at 9pm.

Dw was hopped up on caffeine (she's especially sensitive to it) so she took 1yods, who was still cranky and let me go to bed for (we hoped) a night's sleep. She was up with the baby til 11:30, then she came to bed.

Tuesday morning

Dw has an appointment at 8:30am, during which time I'll need to watch the kids, so she got up at 1:30 to get ready and drive to Champaign for my Tuesday 3am-4am adoration slot. She did that, ate breakfast at Oakley's, went to Lauds & Mass at St. Matt's, the drove around looking at houses for sale until 8:30. Got her new prescription, dropped by the store for essentials, then came home.

Meanwhile, I was up at 3:30am with 1yods, we slept occasionally on the couch. The other kids got up at 6 & had their traditional "2 triangle peanut butter and jelly sandwiches" (6yods) and "2 triangle bologna and cheese sandwiches" (4yodd) with chocolate milk. Yeah, I know.

Dw arrived home, I showered and got dressed. Picked up her new prescription at the local CVS and returned it home, then sped back to Champaign to take her Tuesday noon hour of adoration at St. Matt's.

Tuesday afternoon

Drove thru Hot Wok Express, best Chinese drive-thru in town and only $4, and ate lunch in the library at work. Ensconced in my office at 2:00pm to field various questions and requests for help in person and by email and get up to speed on the latest work stuff (can you tell I signed an NDA?)

Work, work, work. Field questions, answer questions, defer questions, look up something in Knuth's TeXBook.

Machine crashed. This time I remembered to remove Gnome's "iof" files before restarting X.

Tuesday evening

7pm-8:30pm panel discussion at the Champaign library. Good handouts, GREAT cookies! Run by Walgreen's to get infant and children's versions of Tylenol - everyone is coming down with 1yods's thing.

1/2 hour drive home, run through Taco Hell for 3 soft tacos, no sauce, scarf them down on the way home because I forgot to get Taco Hell for dw, who has a thing for Taco Hell. Arrive home - dw and company had pizza! And there's some left over! Scarf, munch, mmrfff. Mmmm.

Filled dw in on the discussion, watched a bit of "Whose Line Is It Anyway" (best show on TV), then 1/2 hour drive back to work for a projected all-nighter.

Wednesday morning plan

3am-4am: adoration at St. Matt's

4:15am-6am: work

6am-6:30am: drive home

6:30-7:30: breakfast, get 6yods ready for doctor appointment

7:30am-8am: drive to doctor in Champaign

8:30-9am: drive back home, go to bed and crash til 11:30am.

Bedrest Resources

My wife has been on bedrest during each of our pregnancies. Here are some promising resources:

Moms on Bedrest
Pregnancy Bedrest.com

And here's a bedrest blog I've not really kept up with.

Lifesavers

These are the folks who saved my uncle's life last week. He was finally persuaded to see a doctor after a month of chest pains and a family history of heart problems.

He's a retired Navy officer, retired computer programmer, and the most virtuous man I've ever known. Even though they're pushing 70, he and my aunt are somehow more energetic and youthful than our thirtysomething friends.

Deo gratias et multos annos.

e5men

The e5 man by fasting for his bride imitates Jesus, the Groom, as described by St. Paul's in Ephesians Chapter 5 (from which the e5 is named). The incarnate God, Jesus, makes a bodily sacrifice for his bride, the Church, to present her to God the Father "without spot or wrinkle." By fasting for our earthly bride and joining our sufferings to Christ's we co-redeem with him. We bring our brides to holiness and at the same time, because of our act of bodily love in unison with Christ, we too become without spot or wrinkle.

Notes on Penitential Practices

Penitential Practices for Today's Catholics

You Never Know...

where you'll find a bit of truth. The kids were watching a commercial-laden Dumbo (as if exploitation by the clowns isn't enough) on the Disney channel this morning when I overheard a line from an ad for some cartoon: "I must give the gift of myself!"

Zoinks! Lately all the kids have received from my gift of myself is a lump of coal, thanks to my selfishness, sleeplessness and wife-on-bedrest stress. It's time to shape up and really give them the gift of myself. Which reminds me of a quote from JP2: "The Eucharist is above all the sacrament of love, understood as gift of self." - Corpus Christi 2001

How to Prepare for Rough Times

Robert Waldrop's "Preparedness Nuggets": good practical advice on simple frugal living.

Despair and Hope

We spent last weekend and the early part of this week visiting my wife's parents in Indiana. It seems that every time we visit we also go to the local hospital's emergency room; this time we made two trips.

Sunday morning at about 8:00, while I was changing the baby's poopy diaper, our 4-year-old daughter quietly told me that she had a bead in her nose. Forget the baby, grab the girl and turn her upside down - yes, there was a small yellow bead stuck way up there. I called my wife since the baby was getting away, and by the time she looked the bead had gone so high we couldn't see it.

Off to the hospital! It was an easy procedure with a lo-o-o-o-ng set of tweezers and we returned to the in-laws' with many promises of never putting beads in noses ever again.

My wife is 11 weeks pregnant and had been spotting a bit over the weekend. Monday morning it wasn't just spotting - there was a gush of blood. There was so much that we thought we had either miscarried already or that a miscarriage was in progress as we drove back to the hospital. There was quite a long wait after the initial care - finding a bed, a quick exam - and as we waited and prayed I carefully noted the locations of the emesis basins and the faucet in case I had to baptize the baby. You never know what sort of doctor you have in a strange hospital, so we told him that if things progessed to a full miscarriage, we'd like to baptize the baby and keep his body. I hear some hospitals treat such things as medical waste. We also asked for a priest (a priest specifically, not a "member of the pastoral staff").

As we waited and waited, I wondered which plot we'd bury the baby in - in Helen's plot or one of our others - where would the gravestone be, we'll need to think about names, and so on. It was a long wait. I figured the priest would be the pastor of the local Church of What's Happening Now, needing more comfort from us that he could give, and hanging out trying to make conversation. That's happened with our home hospital's pastoral coordinator, an ex-Catholic woman who is some sort of "ordained" something-or-other.

My wife is really good at improvising prayers based on each mystery of the Rosary.

Finally the priest arrived, wrapped in a parka. It wasn't Father Relevant; instead, God sent us an old Vietnamese priest who has been incongrously assigned to a rich mega-parish in Greenwood, Indiana, just up Route 31 from the in-laws'. (Strangely, he isn't mentioned in the parish's website, but we have seen him celebrate Mass there before). Anyway, he read a blessing from the Shorter Book of Blessings in an accent sometimes thick enough to be a forgotten language, then as he placed his battered brown hands on my wife's forehead and prayed for her and the baby, God poured holy hope into our souls.

He and his driver left quickly, the doctor came back in with good news, and all is well now. My wife is still bleeding and cramping a bit and needs to rest a lot, but we're still pregnant and the baby is doing fine. Even better, we're thinking about life again rather than death.

(I'm leaving out the horrid bit about filling my wife's bladder to do an emergency ultrasound and other bloody and icky bits; you get the idea :-)

To Decorate in Advent or Not?

There seems to be a trend among some Catholics to eschew Christmas decorations during Advent, the theory being that, well, it's Advent, not Christmas. These folks plan to plug in the decorations on Christmas Eve, the day before the neighbors drag their trees to the curb, then leave them glowing til Epiphany 'cause that's when Christmas ends.

I dunno... the Pope already has his Christmas tree up & lit, and the lights and flowers here at work lend Advent an air of anticipation, recalling the joyful simpler times of my youth (a.k.a. the 1970s) when everyone trotted out the decorations early.

If it conveys a sense of joyful anticipation, why not decorate during Advent? After all, we "wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior." What think ye?

The Wiggles: I'm With Victor

Last week we discovered The Wiggles, and I'm with Victor.

I'm in it for the cool music, which is the sort of thing I'd like to come up with for our kids, and the goofy "I'm a daddy who can't dance but dang it I'll do it anyway" dancing, and their very good Christmas episode, about which Victor blogged. It all seems low-rent compared to other kids' TV, but that's part of its attraction. Plus the kids in the show must work pretty hard on their dance routines. I'm impressed. I can't get Greg's "Iiiiiiiiiin a manger..." tune out of my head. It's a simple tune, but some good melodic thought has gone into it.

He's One of Us

T. S. O'Rama quotes Mark Shea:

And this means that, at some point or other, the American Church (that'd be us) will have to ask itself how our culture came to produce so many of these Sergeant Schulz's and how it was we thought men like Paul Shanley were so cool for so long. The proposition that we poor suffering laity have nothing to do with it becomes more and more unconvincing and the proposition that we have no need to share in the redemptive suffering of the Church strikes me as increasingly untenable.

And something clicked for me - just where do these priests and bishops come from? Moms and Dads, families just like yours. Let's see, the feast of the Holy Family is on December 29 this year...

38 hours, 30 minutes

That's how long I was awake until last night - from Sunday morning til Monday night. IDEA! Dad-to-be boot camp. One week of high-pressure infant and toddler care with a few days of no sleep and a few days of much-interrupted sleep. (Which is worse?)

Here are some boot camp exercises culled from my last six years:

• change a screaming baby's diaper (is it the screaming, the smell, or the texture that eventually disables you?), but he's just discovered that his butt is ticklish
• standard PB&J time trials
• four-year-old girl talking endurance test (our daughter's record is two solid non-stop hours; I couldn't function rationally afterwards)
• The Full Monty: surprise 8 a.m. doctor's appointment 30 miles away, prefaced by baths, breakfast, bundling for winter conditions, packing 3 bags, loading car in a driving below-freezing wind... What's that? You didn't fill the car with gas last night? Hope you remembered the checkbook in all the rush, because there's a bonus trip to the pharmacy. This test would be at the end of the week because there would be absolutely no hope of passing it earlier.

Anything else you can think of?

Big Arm Woman Has One of Those Days

This made me laugh out loud in my cube.

Phil Berrigan's Coffin

Gerard covers Phil Berrigan's funeral and notices his coffin. You can get simple beautiful wooden caskets from Abbey Caskets, a work of Saint Meinrad Archabbey in St. Meinrad, Indiana.

The Funny Guys are On!

That's the cry from the kids when Whose Line Is It Anyway comes on. That's the only TV show we sit down and watch. We might surf a bit to catch some irrevelant news with superficial puerile analysis or to see which blue-haired old lady show is on EWTN, but otherwise the damned thing is off.

Gloria in excelsis Deo

I paid off my last student loan yesterday.

Out til Friday

We're heading to Indiana this evening and we should be back by Thursday night.

Have fun, bloggers!

By the way, the answer to the trivia question is Oregon and Florida - a bit of Oregon is on Mountain time and a bit of Florida is on Central time.

Premeditated Murder

Looks like the baby killers are trying to drum up more business - the Thanksgiving/Christmas season must be a slow time of the year for eviscerating and dismembering babies.

Always Faithful

Kairos Guy presents an excellent defense of his bishop and his diocese.

FDA Recalls and Safety Alerts

Some powdered infant formula has been recalled; fortunately, we use Similac from Ross Pediatrics.

Family Pictures

O for a digital camera.

Glory to God in the Highest!

We're pregnant again!

Holy Shit!

Sorry for the vulgarity, but, well, parents of infants will know what I mean. Back in their diaper days our two oldest children each made a distinctive "poop face" while filling their diapers, and all three of the kids have the same "poop sound" - the classic series of short grunts interspersed with Benedictine silence and Dominican concentration. Aside from the sound, the baby poops with a Jesuit stoicism.

When his poop sounds started up this morning during breakfast, followed quickly by that old stench, I realized that his grunts were the voice of God calling us to holiness; that the road to holiness runs right through his full and stinking diaper. Ah - the smell of holiness! The basis for these scatological thoughts of holiness is, of course, Matthew 25:40, "Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me." If he was serious, then every day we feed, clothe and change Christ himself.

Parents have the privilege of being apostles of the Divine Mercy at just about each moment of the day; if we take care not to resent the opportunity, the spiritual and corporal works of mercy can become virtues we practice daily. As Kimberly Hahn says, "we're changing the world one diaper at a time."

Camping Notes

Camping news: we spent Sunday night at lot 19 in Grove campground in the Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky, and Monday-Saturday at lot 6 in Tsali CG in the Nantahala NF in western North Carolina near Sylva and Cherokee (the reservation, etc.) Tsali is the Spandex capital of the free world - apparently the Fontana Lake area is popular with folks who own both kayaks and mountain bicycles, and Lord knows you can't ride a mountain bike without wearing Spandex. And then there was us (not exactly your kayak and mountain bike sort of folks) with an 8-month-old who went off two or three times a night.

Both campgrounds were "developed", which means they had bathrooms, showers and drinking water, so there were no real adventures like falling off the side of a mountain, which a couple of friends of mine almost did during a real camping & climbing trip last year. We did do the tenting in cold weather thing, and the even better tenting in an 18-hour rain storm thing. And there was the great snake hunt, which I described to our 4-year-old girl and 5-year-old boy thusly:

"There's an old camping tradition that we need to follow when we're camping in a tent in the mountains. Sometimes you have to get up in the middle of the night and take everything out of your tent just to make sure it's clean. It's just one of those fun things we do when we're camping."

We didn't find a snake and the slithering noise in the tent remains unexplained.

Then there was the Clampetts Go to Town episode, in which all our cooking supplies fell out of the van with a loud, long, un-Godly clatter in the parking lot next to the Sylva visitors information center and the town library. The folks in the info center who saw and heard the whole sorry production did a really good job keeping straight faces while I asked for directions to local stores.

Thanks to our hemorrhaging Ford Taurus that spilled its oil in front of a friend's house two days before we left, we had $300 less to camp on than we had planned. That cancelled the Pensacola - Mobile - Route 45 leg of the trip and brought us home with $1.92 to spare. Whee! Father Dubay says that poverty is essential to holiness 0;^)

Note to self: read this, this and this before camping again.

Back Home

We're back from a week at Tsali campground in the Nantahala National Forest in North Carolina (links to follow soon). Right now I'm catching up on the blogs, starting with Disputations, of course, (does this mean I should become a Dominican?) and all the folks John DaFiesole links to.

While we were away, we met a wonderful homeschooling family in Knoxville, Tennessee, and helped celebrate the wedding of a homeschooling friend's daughter in North Carolina. May God and Mary and Saint Pio da Pietrelcina be with the happy couple and their beautiful families.

Whittle a rosary - Oh, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! (as Jack Aubrey would say)

Sylva, North Carolina

Howdy from Sylva, North Carolina!

We're Off to See the Forests

We're leaving for a 2-1/2 week camping trip, hoping to return on Monday October 28. Have fun, bloggers! My wilderness project: whittle a rosary. Surely it's possible, isn't it?

Back Tuesday!

I may blog from home today; if not, no blogging til Tuesday morning. We're off to visit relatives from Saturday to Monday and feast on Granny's perfect beef-n-noodles, piled high atop a mound of mashed potatoes. Mmmmmmmmmmm.

Fatherhood as Priesthood

Robert Gotcher brings up the interesting question of fatherhood as priesthood. Has Pope John Paul II discussed this somewhere? How does this relate to the idea of the "domestic church"?

This reminds me of a couple of my favorite essays on fatherhood and family life:

• Geoffrey Suatees: A Noble Task: The Episcopal Role of the Father
• Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J.: The Family: Monastery of the New Dark Ages

Here are some other likely sources that I haven't had time to read yet:

• Peter A. Kwasnieswski: Fatherhood And The Being Of The Home
• Donald DeMarco: Addressing fatherhood
• Archbishop John J. Myers: "Fathers Make Known To Children Your Faithfulness..."
• Pope John Paul II: Dives in misericordia
• Pope John Paul II: Redemptoris custos

Vacation Planning

We're planning a two-week vacation for later this month - see my Travel Blog for details

Out Sick

My wife and I have finally caught the kids' stomach bug, so I may not be blogging today. We do wash or disinfect hands at every opportunity, but there's been a lot of sneezing and coughing, too. There's not much you can do when you're burping an 8-month-old and he sneezes in your face.

A Heck of a Day for a Garage Sale

What if they threw a garage sale and a tornado showed up?

Central Indiana was hit by at least one tornado last Thursday, which you may have read about on some of the Hoosier blogs (Sean Gallagher, Amy Welborn, Nancy Nall, but I haven't had time to read them yet). A few dozen people were injured and a boatload of apartments, houses and businesses were damaged, but - Deo gratias -no one was killed.

We were about five miles from the tornado's path, and we spent most of Thursday afternoon and evening watching an Indianapolis TV station (channel 13?), first for the live Doppler radar, then for coverage of the damage.

Meanwhile, our daughter turned 4 on Saturday, then promptly started throwing up. A couple of hours later our 5-year-old son started his first bout of diarrhea since babyhood, then the baby started spitting up. Pray for the kids and my wife and her gracious parents - she's left behind at their house with three sick kids, while I'm back in Illinois to go back to work tomorrow.

Our Day at the Hospital

I apologize for missing today's regular postings, and I'll warn you now that I'll be out of town (and away from my computer, God help me) from Thursday morning til Monday morning.

For years we thought our 5-year-old son had a freckle in the iris of his left eye, until his ophthamologist was finally able to take a good look at it recently and decided it's a retinal scar. He sent us to a retinal specialist, and wow - that visit was a disaster. We started with eye drops to dilate 5yob's pupil, and it took three of us to hold him down and keep all his limbs under control. Exhausted by that knock-down drag-out, he quickly fell asleep until the doctor was able to see him. I woke him up for his exam, which started another struggle, so the doctor went to Plan B: a retinal exam under anesthesia.

That was scheduled for this morning (hence no postings on my blog). 5yob was apprehensive as we prepared to go to the hospital, but encouraged by the thought of the toy-filled play room next to the surgery prep center. Once there he played for a good half-hour or so, which provided a nice transition to his preparation for surgery. The eye drops provoked another loud and vast and mighty struggle, as did the gown (go figure), but a nurse finally found a way to calm him down - he rode a wheeled lion scooter into the operating room at the head of a parade of nurses.

He recovered easily and quickly afterwards and the doctor explained his findings - it's a developmental scar, not the result of an injury, and shouldn't affect his sight much at all. We went out for breakfast and a long recuperative stay at the local Barnes & Noble (5yob was still a little clumsy from the anesthesia when we arrived) then picked up his sister and baby brother, dropped by the local library, and headed home for NAPS!

Now I'm at work and trying hard not to blog until I get some other stuff (real work :-) out of the way.

Dies domini

Pope John Paul II's 1998 apostolic letter Dies domini discusses an issue raised in today's Gospel.

The Apostolate of Ordinary Life

ANGELUS OF JOHN PAUL II

Castel Gandolfo
Sunday, 1 September 2002

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

1. In many countries, the month of September means the return to work and school activities following the summer pause, which I hope was serene and profitable for all. Some took advantage of the summer to participate in courses of prayer and spiritual formation, programmes of work and service. Now is the time to share the experiences with family, friends, groups, communities and associations, bringing to daily life enthusiasm, serenity and joy. This is the way to be the "salt and light" of the earth, as I reminded the young people gathered in Toronto for World Youth Day.

2. From the psychological point of view, it is not easy to return to daily life. In fact, sometimes it might be difficult to return again to one's daily obligations. However, it is in our daily work ("ferialità") that God calls us to acquire that maturity of the spiritual life which consists in living the ordinary things in an extraordinary way.

Indeed, we achieve holiness by following Jesus, not by avoiding reality and its trials, but by facing them in the light and strength of his Spirit. As today's liturgy emphasizes, all of this finds its greatest enlightenment in the mystery of the Cross. Jesus asks believers to take up their own cross every day and follow him (cf. Mt 16,24), imitating him in the total gift of self to God and one's neighbour.

Archconfraternity of Christian Mothers

Over at Oblique House, Ellyn vonHuben mentioned the Archconfraternity of Christian Mothers and their prayer book, Mother Love.

The Archconfraternity has a website at which you can buy a copy of Mother Love for only US$10. Their email address is christianmothers@capuchin.com.

Yay - A Book Burning!

Sometimes, the only reasonable thing to do with a book is burn it. Ellyn vonHuben, despite her regrettable lack of judgment in the Springsteen matter, did the Right Thing(TM) with a children's book about Margaret Sanger, Every Child a Wanted Child. The mind boggles. How about The Little Aryan's Big Book of Jewish Cooking?

An amazon search revealed the author: Nancy Whitelaw. A google search reveals more from Ms. (no doubt) Whitelaw, including the precious Joseph Stalin: From Peasant to Premier.

Sound like contest time. Can you come up with a children's book as odious as "A biography of Margaret Sanger, the indomitable fighter for birth control and a feminist who asked women to take responsibility for their freedom" (suitable reading for ages 9 and up)?

Update: on second thought, maybe a contest of grotesqueries isn't such a good idea. There's a surfeit of the grotesque on the net.

The Three General Grants

No, not Ulysses. We're talking indulgences, baby! These are grants of indulgences from the 1969 Enchiridion of Indulgences:

First General Grant

A partial indulgence is granted to the faithful who, in the performance of their duties and in bearing the trials of life, raise their mind with humble confidence to God, adding--even if only mentally--some pious invocation.

So your son can't wipe his behind yet and calls out, "Daddy! I've pooped!" Raise your mind with humble confidence to God, mutter "Jesus, Mary and Joseph" and commence wiping.

Second General Grant

A partial indulgence is granted to the faithful, who in a spirit of faith and mercy give of themselves or of their goods to serve their brothers in need.

Parenthood in a spirit of faith and mercy = constant partial indulgence

Third General Grant

A partial indulgence is granted to the faithful, who in a spirit of penance voluntarily deprive themselves of what is licit and pleasing to them.

Sometimes with little kids around, the "voluntary" part is difficult. Do your best.

Protestants and Humanae Vitae

Here's Kathryn Jean Lopez's review of Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception.

More works from Kathryn Jean Lopez and a quick biography.

Republic vs. Empire

Some of you may know Robert Waldrop from the old CatholiCity y2k list. This just in from Robert, of the Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House in Oklahoma City:

We have a new website, http://stopspendingstopwar.org. It's kind of a distributist plot to defend the republic against the empire. ("Kind of" he says.) Pass the word along.

Here is Robert's other website.

He's sort of an orthodox radical liberal conservative, or something :-) which just goes to show that sometimes those labels don't make much sense. How about distributist? That probably covers it pretty well.

Barbecue Schmarbeque

So the store has boneless beef ribs on sale but you get home and find that there's no barbeque sauce handy? Get a bowl and mix ketchup, Worchestershire sauce and steak sauce. That's Bachelor 101. Then ask your wife to do a taste test and watch her add Vidalia onion salad dressing and (gasp!) applesauce. Tastes pretty darn good.

Hard Day's Night

I've pulled two all-nighters in a row, followed by all day with the kids at home while Lisa works at the bookstore. The owners of the store are taking a short and well-deserved vacation and with my flexible schedule Lisa is able to cover for them. So the kids and I are organizing around the house, thanks to some good "clean-up" music: Jaco Pastorius's album Invitation, the Meat Puppets album Too High to Die and the Red Hot Chili Peppers album with their remake of Stevie Wonder's Higher Ground. What's it take to get on our playlist? You've gotta be at least as harmonically interesting as the Beatles.