Orphans. Do you see these darling children?
Brett still needs a mama. Iris finally has a family committed to her and they were supposed to have met her on the 29th.
Stopping here this week. We got some really tough news today (don’t worry — Daniel is fine) and I’m really not feeling like writing right now. Do me a favor and pray for our special intention (related to the one from yesterday). Please and thank you.
For more Quick Takes, visit Jen at ConversionDiary.Com.
Interesting… My friend Kristen posted a link to this article on Facebook. I don’t know if the presence of said missionaries is the exact reason why some countries did better than others in terms of development but it is an interesting theory.
Apparently, I’m “sheenazing”. I got nominated for a Sheenazing Award in the “Best Blog by a Non Papist” category. I’m up against Ann Voskamp and Ree Drummond so I’m not expecting to win, but hey… I’d love your vote anyway! To vote, click on the picture.
Orphans. Do you see these darling children?
Brett still needs a mama. Iris finally has a family committed to her and they have an appointment in her country next week.
Touched. I’m a James Martin, S.J. fangirl and after finishing The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, I wrote him a note telling him how much I appreciated his writing and his Christian witness. This week, I got a note back from him thanking me for the one I sent him. This is a guy who has many balls in the air that he’s juggling and I’m touched that he took the time to write me back.
It’s probably fitting that I got through 218 pages of My Life with the Saints (re-reading it) while I was sitting in the E.R. with the wee bairn on Monday.
Update on the Daniel bear. The bear child was completely wired on Sunday night (would not go to sleep until 1 a.m.) and woke up coughing on Monday. It was a school holiday so we lazed around the house all day in our jammies and I did a few breathing treatments on him. The problem: he started “belly breathing” (where you’re using your abdominal muscles to move air because you’re not getting good lung function) and the breathing treatments weren’t helping. I decided to take him to the ER at UCD Medical Center which was packed. Thankfully, there was a bed in the pediatric ER so we got in immediately after being triaged. Daniel was feeling so awful that he was content to curl up in my lap on the gurney. They did two breathing treatments and gave him some steroids which got him back to normal. We also broke in a new resident and a new ER attending physician which was lovely. (It’s funny in a twisted way that we know one of the ER physicians so well that she comments on how much Daniel has grown.) After 6 hours in the ER, we got home around 12:30 and Jon bathed Daniel while I ate something (my first solid food in 12 hours — wheeeeeeee!!!!) and put him to bed while I showered.
Little boy has been home the last few days and has done well thus far. We were doing breathing treatments every 4 hours on Tuesday and Wednesday and we’ve only had to do one of them today.
Source of the Stephen Colbert quote from last week. I found the video with the quote I referenced here on the Colbert Nation site. I’m having issues embedding it so you’re going to have to take my word on this one. The pertinent quote is at the end of the video.
Update on the laptop situation. The case manager from HP called me on Wednesday morning. My laptop is shipping as we speak and will be here on/before the 28th. Of course, I don’t have my tracking number memorized and I’m not checking Fed Ex eleventy-billion times to see if it has cleared customs in China yet. Noooooo…
For more Quick Takes, visit Jen at ConversionDiary.Com.
Jon has offered his laptop to me until mine comes back from the repair facility. My mother-in-law lent me hers while I was down there so I’ve been able to read the guest posts during my sabbatical. My deepest thanks to Kym, Mandi, and Beth Anne for doing some guest posts while I was with family. I appreciate the three of you so much!
While I was gone…
-I read some good books: Mysteries of the Middle Ages And the Beginning of the Modern World by Thomas Cahill, Death’s Parallel by Oakley Jordan, and the first chapter of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life by James Martin, S.J. (the official chaplain of Colbert Nation).
-I spent some time with family and friends: December 25-28 in San Jose where I spent time with my parents, had coffee with my friend Rebecca, and took some walks with Daniel. December 28-January 2nd was spent in Claremont with my in-laws. I got to see my nephew Patrick (who at 7 months outweighs Daniel at 2 years old — he’s a chubby baby but I also have a seriously underweight child) and some of Jon’s extended family as well as get some rest while my mother-in-law took over Daniel care.
-I’ve been limited in my Facebook and Twitter time which isn’t a bad thing.
-I’ve escalated things with HP to the point where I now have my own case manager. I’m calling them daily to get updates on my laptop since nobody seems to know what’s going on. I think Kelly is right — this is customer service hell!
I uploaded all my text files onto my cloud before I sent in my laptop so I thankfully have everything necessary to participate in memes. Now, I think I’ll go hit up Target for some latches to replace the ones that Daniel has figured out. (Life with an autistic kid is not boring in the slightest.)
Thanks Jen for letting me Guest Post during your Sabbatical! Here is another post about Family Holiday Traditions
Growing up holidays were always a pretty big deal. I’m 3/4 Italian. My dad was Italian on both sides and my Mom was 1/2 Italian (her mom was Italian and her dad was English)..but lets face it 90% of the traditions she has are italian as her grandma also lived with them most of her life. My great-grandparents were never divorced but lived separately for MANY years…my grandmother was very Catholic and was of a generation that didn’t believe in divorce.
Every Christmas for as long as I remember we’ve made the same things. Italian Cookies, Butter Cookies, and homemade Raviolis. And every year when we make them we tell stories of how my grandmother and great grandmother used to make them differently. Several years ago my Aunt made everyone a binder of all my great-grandmother’s christmas recipes we use it every year.
This year was no different. We made Italian Cookies.
and as my mom iced them we joked about the way my great grandmother used to take a knife and individually ice each cookie…and we are way too impatient for that and just dunk the cookies into the icing (it’s a very thin icing).?Some years we went to NY to visit relatives and my cousins and I would make the cookies together. This year we exchanged text messages and photos of our cookies.?
All of our cookies:?
The way we make Ravioli’s has changed since my great-grandmother’s time. She used to use nothing but a rolling pin and a pasta board….yeah we tried that once and didn’t get very far….we now use the pasta attachments for the Kitchenaid (and let me tell you what used to be an all day affair is now done in less than 2 hours) and this year we added the ravioli attachment. I haven’t decided how I like that attachment yet…
Christmas Eve was also a pretty big deal. We always celebrated the Feast of the Seven Fishes. I honestly never knew where this tradition came from. I just knew you either had 7 fish dishes to represent the 7 sacraments or 12 for the 12 disciples. However this year I decided to google about the feast and I found this website. And according to tradition back in the day Christmas Eve used to be a penitential day (similar to Good Friday) and many Italian Catholics didn’t eat meat until after they received communion at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.?
I shared the article with my mom and this is what she had to say,?
The people from Naples are famous for their elaborate spreads of cold shellfish cocktails and hot fish dishes, as well as the?roasted peppers?and?antipasti.?—- ha ha that’s where i get it from…my grandmother was from a mountain town not far from naples/foggia italy
One thing I have learned over the years is no matter how old I get and whether we have dinner for 3 or dinner for 30 on Christmas Day the traditions are very important to me. It’s weird to have Christmas and not do any baking…even if we only make one batch of cookies. Every year we tell the same stories about how things used to be and how Grandma and Great-Grandma did things differently and laugh at their crazy stories. It’s a fun way to spend time together and I wouldn’t have the holidays any other way.?
Beth Anne is a single catholic blogger that blogs about the single life, being catholic, her love for Disney, her frugal adventures, her crazy cats, and other adventures she comes across. She lives in historical St. Augustine, FL and once received a postcrossing postcard that told her her city was like living in a Fairytale :). She blogs at BethAnnesBest.com and tweets @BethAnnesBest
FOR TODAY December 15, 2013
Outside my window… dark. As usual, I’m doing this at night once every other creature in the house is asleep. It was maybe in the 50’s today — definitely warmer than a week ago!
I am thinking… about Thomas‘ twins who were born this weekend.
I am thankful… that I have less Christmas crocheting than I anticipated.
In the kitchen… I baked 3 batches of cookies yesterday, most of which disappeared after church this morning.
I am wearing… black t-shirt with constellations and my blue striped fleece pajama bottoms.
I am creating… cotton snowflake ornaments for the family gift drawing this year. The theme is “homemade”.
I am going… to be starching these ornaments tomorrow.
I am wondering… if I missed anyone on my Christmas card list. I got all of them done this afternoon while sitting at $tarbux and listening to a talk by Fr. James Martin, S.J. on humor and faith.
I am reading… Mysteries of the Middle Ages by Thomas Cahill. I don’t get a lot of reading time right now (my own fault) so this might be a book I finish on the way down to southern California after Christmas.
I am hoping… I can get all my shopping done and everything mailed off in time for Christmas.
I am looking forward to… my massage on Friday.
Around the house… my Roomba just finished cleaning the floors. (It was a gift from my mother-in-law for my last birthday.)
I am pondering… many things.
A favorite quote for today… ??For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning – not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.?? — Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat
One of my favorite things… my Jacquie Lawson Advent calendar.
A few plans for the rest of the week: installing my new keyboard whenever it arrives (a certain little blond boy decided to remove the keys from my current one and broke the Tab key), ABA therapy for Daniel in the afternoons from Monday to Friday, doctor’s appointment for the wee bairn on Tuesday morning, quarterly meeting with all of Daniel’s ABA staff, my massage on Friday afternoon, and a respite night on Saturday night.
A peek into my day… the talk I was watching while compiling Christmas cards.
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Orphans. Do you see these precious children?
Brett still needs a mama. Iris finally has a family committed to her and their dossier has been submitted to her country.
Because, you know, speaking normal English would defeat the point. My tasoni friend sent me this. I understood and resonated with all the jargon spoken by the blogger about his autistic son and am shaking my head because my people use a whole different set.
Let it snow. We might actually get a trace amount of snow in Sacramento on Friday night. It’s down in the 20’s at night right now which is freaking out a lot of people and making me laugh because the 20’s are a walk in the park compared to some of the temps in Minnesota and Montana when I lived there. (It was -25F in Great Falls this morning according to some of my friends there.) The hard thing for me is that our washer/dryer are in a laundry shed so I’m going to be getting up shortly, putting on fleece, and going out there to sort through clothes and find something for my wee bairn to wear to school tomorrow.
Jeans. Last week, I was getting a pair of my 4 year old jeans from Lands’ End out of the dryer to wear them to the airport to pick up Jon and discovered that they had a massive hole in the rear end. (Thankfully, I discovered this BEFORE I wore them.) I went onto the Kohl’s website to order more, figuring that I wouldn’t be able to go shopping before Black Friday (when I wanted nothing to do with retail) only to find out that Jon was fine with watching Daniel so I could go after his eye appointment the next day. OK… It was too late to cancel the order on the Kohl’s website so I just kept those and went out to shop the next day. End result: 4 pairs of jeans that fit me (after taking them to my seamstress to be hemmed) for less than the cost of 2 pairs of jeans from Lands’ End. I still have one pair of 4 year old jeans from Lands’ End left so I actually have enough pants for a change.
Advent music. My friend Thomas of Fuller Life put together an amazing playlist for Advent.
More Advent music. Bonnie of A Knotted Life has a great playlist as well that she shared a few weeks ago.
Potty-training. I think I should be getting time off of Purgatory for the time I spend potty-training Daniel. We’re on our second shot of it and it’s a headache for me, especially as nothing we try seems to be working. I have his ABA therapists working with me on it and even they are a bit stumped because this is definitely not anything they’re used to (and these are people who have been in the business for a fairly long time). Pray for me.
For more Quick Takes, visit Jen at ConversionDiary.Com.
FOR TODAY December 1, 2013
Outside my window… dark now though it was sunny and in the 60’s earlier. It’s gotten cold lately and I’m loving it.
I am thinking… about what’s going to be coming up this week. For a change, my mornings are free of Daniel appointments.
I am thankful… for a good time with family this weekend.
In the kitchen… made lasagna from scratch today.
I am wearing… black shirt and blue striped fleece pajama bottoms.
I am creating… this entry and Christmas card mailing lists.
I am going… to try and knock out as much editing as possible tomorrow morning.
I am wondering… if my precious sweetling will go to bed on his own or if drastic measures will have to be taken.
I am reading… Confessions of a Counterfeit Farm Girl by Susan McCorkindale. It’s about a New Jersey marketing director who moves to a 500 acre beef farm. It’s very typically “fish out of water” but it’s cute.
I am hoping… this new attempt at potty-training goes better.
I am looking forward to… my mani-pedi on Friday. I never dreamed I’d be saying this a year ago.
Around the house… laundry to be folded.
I am pondering… too many things.
A favorite quote for today… ??Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.?? – Benjamin Franklin
One of my favorite things… peppermint taffy.
A few plans for the rest of the week: ABA therapy for Daniel, mani-pedi and massage for me on Friday, and my parents coming up to help clean out Jon’s study on Saturday.
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