7 Quick Takes - The Advent of Hope

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With the beginning of a new (liturgical) year and almost ending of another (calendar) year, I thought perhaps a few Quick Takes might be in order.  For starters, I want to say that I still love blogging as much as ever, and my new year's resolution (one of many) is to blog more in 2019, hopefully at least once a month.  I miss so many bloggers who have fallen off the radar.  So, what do you say?  Start a blog in 2019? Revive a blog in 2019?  Who's with me?  I would love to have a more active blog roll with a few more blogs listed in the coming year.

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It's the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary today and I wanted to share this photo of the bouquet of flowers I bought at our local grocery store.  I love to buy flowers, especially in the winter, and put them in my kitchen.  I always buy the discounted bouquets that have started to fade, and they usually hold up at least a week.  Then, when they are really faded, I move them outside and place them on Francis, Karol and Isaac's graves.  Anyhow, when I found this particular bouquet last Saturday, I wasn't a big fan of the blue and white, because it looked so artificial, but it was all they had in the under $5 category, so I bought it.  Only after I got home did I realize how appropriate the colors were for today's solemnity.  And then last night, just as we were preparing to go to the vigil mass for the holy day, I noticed that during the day, the lilies in the bouquet had opened up and were just gorgeous! The Blessed Mother loves lilies, right? So, I took it as a little sign from her because she's always trying to send us hugs from heaven.

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Last night, before the vigil mass, this little guy took a big step in preparing for his First Holy Communion this spring.  Meet my newest little penitent!  I am so stinking proud of him.  He struggles with all things new and unknown, and it was a huge leap for him to enter that confessional alone.  He stepped out with a grin on his face from ear-to-ear and wanted to know if he can go to confession again next week. LOL! He celebrated with a big piece of cake leftover from St. Nicholas day, a real treat since we don't usually do desserts on Fridays (days of abstinence).  What a wonderful way to start off Advent.

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Speaking of St. Nicholas day, here are a few pics from that little celebration.  We started celebrating St. Nicholas day four years ago, mostly as a way to move the focus away from the secular Santa Claus and more towards Santa Claus, the saint.  It was a good move on our part because our boys now look forward to this saint's feast day almost as much as Christmas, plus they know the story behind the real St. Nick. They got shoes filled with candy, a few gifts, and we made ribs on the grill and a gluten/egg-free pineapple upside-down cake.  A little gift from God in the form of a light snow the night before, which surprised us with an enchanted white forest outside our windows, was the cherry on top of the day.

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Next week, on the feast of St. Lucy, we will hang the lights on our banisters and tree.  I like to add the lights first and then put up the other decorations on Gaudete Sunday.  The decorations remain until the Baptism of the Lord but the lights stay up until Candlemas.   I love doing our decorating in stages like this (much less pressure to get it all.done.now), and it helps us be more mindful of some of the more notable feasts that occur during Advent and Christmastide.

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We still don't have any snow but a good snowstorm is in the forecast for Sunday night.  My boys are so excited because we only got to go sledding one time last year, and they haven't seen a really good snowfall in almost a year.  Even though we homeschool, we do give them "snow days".  The rule is that it has to snow more than 3 inches in order to get a day off of lessons.  So, they keep asking if we will get 3 inches this Sunday.  It's gonna be close, but I have my order in.  Moms like snow days, too!

January 2018

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So really, there isn't much news, which is good news.  Life just goes on at a pace that I can barely keep up with.  When lighting our first Advent candle this past Sunday, we read about how it is the "hope" candle.  I have been thinking about that a lot lately...hope.  I thought about it last Saturday while attending a funeral for a longtime friend who died rather unexpectedly.  Driving 80 miles to the church through a cold, hard rain, suddenly the rain stopped and the clouds broke and in the distance on the horizon, just barely visible, was a rainbow.  A sign of hope. And this past week, when my son visited his therapist, whom he has been seeing for years, and she commented that she was being amazed by his progress, I felt hope. And when I reflect upon this past year, the new relationship that God gave us with my child's birthmother, the healing that has occurred in her, and my children, and in me, in the past several months, I can't help but be filled with hope.  None of it has come easy, this healing, the losses, but along every step of the way, God gives us little nudges and signs to keep going.  Maybe it's a rainbow on the way to a funeral.  Maybe it's a lily in a cheap bouquet.  Maybe it's a grin from ear-to-ear after a fear is conquered. Or maybe all our hope is held in just a single snowflake, when God knows that all we need is just a day off from the hard stuff.

Ready to Receive: A Call to Adopt

Our family has a new addition!  Meet Chessie.  

It seems appropriate that we adopted Chessie during National Adoption Month, and so I wrote a story about it.

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The puppy looked at me eagerly from behind the wires of her cage.  Anxious eyes and a wagging bobbed tail expressed anticipation that she could not keep contained, as her entire little body shook with excitement and apprehension. I slid open the door to her pen and reached for her.  I knew that it was all over now.  I knew that the moment I held her, I would be hooked, and that she would be coming home with me.

I did not really want another dog.  My husband and I had already owned what we knew would be the best dog we would ever have.  A pure-bred mutt, she’d been the most obedient, gentle, loyal, and intelligent pet anyone could possibly imagine.  When we’d found her, left abandoned as a puppy on the side of a forest road, she too had shaken with apprehension mixed with excitement. My husband and I were newlyweds when we found her, and she became our first “child”.  Little did we know that she would be our only child for the next decade to come.  We named her “Sage”, in hopes that once she outgrew her puppy years, during which she acted like she didn’t have much of a brain, she would live up to her name and become a wise and faithful companion.  By the time she passed away, silently in her sleep on our front porch sixteen years later, she’d become all that and more.  She’d become irreplaceable.

Soon after we lost Sage, my children began asking if we could get another dog.  Not yet, I’d said.  Maybe not ever, I thought.  How could we replace a dog that was irreplaceable?  No other dog could ever meet the standard that Sage had set.  Besides, we had three children now, including a toddler, and that was more than enough to take care of.  Getting another dog, especially a puppy, would just add to the load.  And so, for over a year, I’d pushed back when they’d asked.  God will send us a dog when he is ready, I would say, but I certainly wasn’t going to go looking for one.  And as I tried to explain my rationalizations, I felt an old familiar feeling, and my mind went back to a memory from many years ago.

Sage was five years old in this memory, and my husband and I were in our mid-thirties.  We’d been trying for five years to have a baby and had just lost our first pregnancy in miscarriage.  I sobbed and wrapped my arms around Sage, our only “baby”.  I thought about how hard this had all been, how unfair, how perhaps I wasn’t meant to be a mother.  I thought about how old I was getting, how long it had taken to get pregnant just once, how I’d likely never get to parent more than one child, should I ever get that lucky. I thought about how my biological child whom I’d just buried, was irreplaceable.

And I thought about adoption.  But not much.  Not seriously.  God will send us a baby when he is ready, I would say to myself, but I certainly wasn’t going to go looking for one.  How could any child replace a child of my own flesh and blood?  How could I understand any child that did not share my or my husband’s biological background, with all the personality quirks and habits that our genetics express.  It all just seemed too risky, to take on a child with no real knowledge of his or her ancestry, genetics, and with having no control over the environment to which they’d previously been exposed.  Much like taking in a puppy, I wasn’t ready for that load of unknowns and unpredictability. What I was ready for was a child like the one I’d created in my mind, one that I considered irreplaceable.

As time passed, I prayed for the hole in my heart to heal, but instead, it grew bigger and bigger. I begged God to take the pain away and felt abandoned by him as my prayers for a child remained unanswered. Another year passed, and by the time it ended, I was emotionally and spiritually spent.  I had no more energy left with which to fight God. As experienced by so many of the saints, I felt trapped within my own “dark night of the soul”.  No longer convinced that my desires were those of God’s, I slowly began to surrender my plans and slowly open myself up to his.  One night, wiping tears from my face after yet another month of disappointment, I spoke the words that I had been trying to push out of my head for over a year.  “I want to adopt”, I said to my husband.  It was a moment of complete surrender for me and once I actually said the words, I realized it was the calling that I had been resisting all along.  My husband agreed quickly.  His heart ready and now, so was mine.

The healing began almost immediately.  Hopelessness turned into hope.  For the first time in years, I felt like God was hearing me again and helping me along my journey. Was this what he’d wanted all along? We excitedly began the long, arduous process of contacting adoption agencies, weighing our options, calculating the financial costs, starting a home study.  Fingerprinting, background checks, training sessions, profile books, interviews, and writing lots of checks dominated all our free time for the next few months.  None of it was fun nor easy but we embraced it all nonetheless, knowing that each step brought us closer to filling the hole in our hearts.  And then the waiting began.  Waiting to be chosen by a birthmother.  Waiting for someone to say that we were good enough to be their child’s parents.  Waiting for someone to believe that we were irreplaceable.

I thought about all those feelings as I scooped the little black and white puppy in my hands.  As she looked up at me with coal black eyes, she relaxed in my arms, just as my children had done the first time I’d held them.  Her coloring and markings reminded me of Sage, who also had been a black and white lab-mix.  But this was not Sage and I was finally ready to accept that.  I was ready to receive what God had been preparing for me.

Placing the puppy in her crate, I loaded her into the passenger side of my car and took her home to her new family.  To my family.  To three happy little boys, two of whom had come to us through adoption, and who were, without a doubt, irreplaceable.  

Goodbye Summer

I do not care much for summertime (although I do love September).  I suppose that's not exactly the most popular opinion these days. And I also suppose that if I were writing this blog post in late February, rather than late September, I'd be more hesitant to make such a statement. But it is not February and right now, all I can think about is just how weary the summers make me.

When you grow much of your own food, and process it, summer means more work.  A lot more. The long days of sunshine bring twelve or more hours of activity, and by season's end, I am wore out. Rising early and squeezing the most out of every moment before sunset, I parcel my day out into pieces. This summer, in particular, was a challenge, as I added some part-time biologist work (away from home) to an already heavy load.  Tom traveled more than usual on business this summer, and homeschooling, summer camps, and a couple of short family trips filled in the gaps.  Together, we all made it work, and we have a lot to show for our efforts, but I am ready for the season to end.

Right now, at the moment that I write this, I am part of a perfect, universal balance...the autumnal equinox. Beyond this day, there will be more darkness which, for me, brings more rest. Six months from now, the balance will be struck again, and I will feel the anxiety and hurriedness that comes with each extra hour of sunlight. But not today. Today, I celebrate a productive harvest and all that summer brought, but most of all, I celebrate the fact that for a few months to come, I no longer have to keep up.

Happy First Day of Autumn!

looking for potato bugs

chamomile harvesting

sweet potato slips under the jugs

a natural beauty we found in the woods (yellow fringed orchid)

conquering a fear of the water slide

when you forget your swim clothes, you swim anyway

school on the front porch and breaking beans

capturing the morning sunshine full-faced

a furry friend I found while working

too many cucumbers. again.

a sign of summer's end.

and another sign...he just turned two.