What I Will Miss About Pregnancy

-The unbelievable quickening, fluttering of fingers or Beckham-like kicks.
-The mood-altering and delicious naps.
-The restorative and affirming powers of prenatal yoga.
-A friend once said that a short haircut is great because when it's growing out, it's a new hairstyle every two weeks. My functioning wardrobe is this way, this live organism. What looked great last week, looks like a sad midriff the next. Or the unflattering floor-length, elastic-waisted hippie skirt from college can be worn empire waist-style above the belly and worn with boots and then hits at a more modern knee-length.
-The way, during the last trimester especially, you become really focused like an ironman triathlete. You become primal and you get the animal-look in your eye.
-Wondering about meeting the baby.
-Having super-wide aperture for great names-- in literature, film credits, even the "contributors" section in magazines often have photographers or freelance writers with totally phenomenal names like "Ava Coen-Chowderay makes her life in Melbourne with her husband actor, Hugh Chancery and their daughter Ruby Plum."
-The hormono-coaster that had me flat out weeping to the song "In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel tonight while making dinner. (They use the rhyme "thousand churches" and "all my fruitless searches." Um, come on!)

To Remember for a Successful Week

-PLAY with the kids, join their game.
-Try to resist valuing tidiness over them.
-Read what I want while they are reading. (I found "When I was at my mother's breast, you made me trust you." from Psalm 22)
-It's okay to screen phonecalls.
-When coping with stir-craziness, go outside, whatever the weather.
-Call a sane and optimistic friend.
-Get down on the floor and let them lead play.
-Draw with them. BE WITH them.
-It's okay to tell them I have to go make dinner and don't need helpers right now.
-Look at a clock and really allow them time to get something done or to let off steam.
-The boys are old enough to arbitrate their own conflicts and it is a complex task, assigning fault.
-Keep a running list: things to find, ways to make things go more smoothly for next time, things I don't want to forget that they said.
-Display their artwork immediately.
-Ask them to pick up their clothes every day. Praise their teamwork.

Four

Today at circle, Benicio's news was that his mom woke him up in the night to give him lunch. So much for waking up at 5:45am to give him breakfast in bed. Anyway, this is for Benicio True:

What can I say to my right hand man? When I see that we are the same, I think, "Oh, no. He's in for heart-ache!" But Benici, this way with people that you have, your ability to make friends, to have the game go according to your plot, I see your winsomeness and I am flabbergasted. It seems like yesterday when I was nursing Manny in the rocking chair and my water broke and we met you that night! You came into the world on a cozy Cambridge night. Dad and I took a long icy walk down Cambridge Street, your waterbag dripping into my clogs and me pressing my face into Dad's sweater for contractions. The room was so warmly dim, us quietly awaiting your sure and perfect descent. I see you flip and roll on the couch and I remember how you emerged and how I got to grab you and pull you out, this little hot spunky form, wriggly and beautiful! I think with the firstborn, we are adversaries, "Will you be able to lead? Will you be okay out in the world?" But I think with the second, you, I think, "The world has no idea the potency and the delight you are going to bring!"

You show us how to be our strong, unapologetic selves wherever we go, not to be shy of our super-ness even if we are at the food co-op or the library. I see you with your sister and how you feed her with your little hands, you never skimp when you share. You are a source of warmth for this family. I see you with your friends at school, making yourself heard, sometimes not being understood, blinking back tears when you get hurt. When you choose not to tell me who or how you got hurt, at first I am worried and then I see that you are equipped and that you don't need my help. I did NOT think that would be the case so soon! For your hidden wounds, I know that Christ is salve. For your battles on the far playground and the ones where you are not triumphant, I know that Christ is advocate for you. I see that your childhood is such a rich time. May your cup overflow with mirth and innocence and boundless fruition of all your covert plans. My impish and intense boy, your fixed and expectant gaze, what a year you have had! May God grant you a hundred more.

Thank you, little oven!

We are emerging from our holiday weekend slowly but steadily. Wow, when you have a big family, you really sign on for the WORK, man. But the best kind of work, I think. Geoff and I worked as a synergistic partnership. He laid the plywood for the kitchen floor on Tuesday night and did not stop working even up to last night when he was my shift-switch for a feverish baby girl and then this morning when he co-oped for me so I could take said baby to her doc. Also, it must be said that our Jenn Air oven gave an incredible performance on Thursday. I think it was on from 7am well into the afternoon, cooking up our two gorgeous turkeys as well as various other things such as our whole wheat crusted pies and spinach casserole.

Other T-giving highlights: My brother, Ron on Thursday built a beautiful, smokeless fire. My parents arriving early Thursday morning to decorate and my dad to prep his amazing spiral ham and then to help me with my own dish's presentation. The adorable little girl's table at T-giving for Clara, Lucia and Cecelia-- with a teacup full of fresh roses and tiny place-settings. Geoff took the boys to see Happy Feet on Friday. He said that for the suspenseful parts they sat in his lap, I love that. My parents and I took Clara for her first Black Friday retail spree. Her favorite parts were my dad teaching her to throw pennies into the fountain and the accessory aisle at H & M. Saturday, Geoff and I got a date to the Tresoros show at PMA (Thanks, Mema Maggie!) , sitting in the restaurant together, evaluating our life and laughing at the way that time is passing. Sunday's visit with Williamsburg Legaspi's. Manny and Benici learning to play Sardines with their cousins. This house has not yet been so thoroughly occupied and thoroughly enjoyed. What a juicy weekend. Here's to creative uses for leftovers and getting our routine back!

P.S. Photos to follow, trying to figure out how to upload my pics.

thank-full

We are hosting a dozen guests this year for Thanksgiving. After figuring out to do my conventional grocery-shopping (laundry soap, paper towels, cream of mushroom soup) during Eagles' games and doing my Weaver's Way shopping the minute they open in the morning, I feel that my kitchen is robustly stocked. Now, it's just a matter of getting the menu under control so that I can be a mad-crazy prepping machine tomorrow. Fine-slicing, julienne-ing, etc. I have never done this before, hosted a holiday like this. Geoff and I have had our own holidays for years now, us carving our own funky little traditions (paella on Easter, writing New Year's predictions with champagne, pajamas all day on Christmas) but having larger family there, you really want to honor the over-arching traditions. We have some inter-generational action this year, too. (Can you stay up late playing Taboo by the fire if you have to make coffee for your parents at 6:30a.m?

Anyway, I am trying to be a more open-hearted hostess. An intuitive and wise (yet totally unchurched) friend was telling me that when she struggles with discontentment and restlessness, she tries to let go of it and await something new and eternal to enter its place. I so want this, the maturity and wisdom to RELEASE my clench-grip on perfection, or the admiration of others, or even the structure of a schedule OR the need for a new car or something tangible and to LET GO and await something from God to take its place. I think something supernatural would have to happen for me to have that kind of patience.

Here's to your holiday, reader, may something in you soften and release. And may something completely OTHER enter its place, something too beautiful to explain and may it stay with you.

Language Explosion

There is definitely some language acquisition happening here at the Beatty home. Manny's circle at school has begun hand-spelling, so well now that after the first 3 or 4 letters, they can identify which classmate's name is being spelled. Manny has really taken to the Bob Books, which are so simple his confidince is really high. We have his cousins' well-worn phonics sound chart and with the exception of a few vowels, he is totally reading. It is so gratifying, witnessing the light go on for him. He will walk by the sign with a nonchalant swagger, "It says, clean up after your dog." Or "There's ANOTHER poster for 'Happy Feet."
As for the wee-lady of the house, she is doing what I remember blogging about Manny doing: babbling this whole stream of syllables and then wading in it and finding the nuggets of actual meaning. Today she called up the stairs, "Dada? Baba, Brothers." And of course, her first sentence with fuzzy cell phone pressed into her neck, "Hi, yeah, okay." My favorite is when she goes around the room chatting and gesturing. If you are sitting on the floor, she will walk over to you, bend at the waist, and peer into your face and then offer you a sloppy, delicious kiss OR she will tilt her head inquisitively and say "Apapa, kay, abba." as if by saying that she has set the record straight. You just want to say, "Yes, uh huh, absolutely. Michiko Kakatani could not have said it better."

30 Minute Departure Routine for Manny

I could not send him to school today. Last night, we heard him on the monitor--periodic and dry cough. This morning I responded with wild anger to his dawdling. He woke up tired, fitful and sensitive. When we are getting ready to get out the door, I feel like it is God's exercise in stretching my patience. I see him yoga-style, gently pushing my back down to get a deeper stretch, to get me to feel my human limit. Sometimes, I can manage to get a little creative, to flex with my little preschoolers and toddler. Sometimes, however, I snap and clench my jaw and raise my voice to levels I am ashamed to admit.

This morning was a snap-morning, so much that when the boys' ride arrived, Manny was convulsing from being disciplined and in no emotional state to be at school. I spent the morning trying to read to him, to give him snacks, listen to his inventions and hydrate him. My additional penance is this list for a half-hour window before door-time:

1. Begin by saying, "It's time to start preparing to leave for school. Here's a 'SAVE' sign for your invention or here's where you can find a box to save your game. "
2. Have socks, shoes and backpack ready on lower steps.
3. "Honey, please make your way up to the third floor for peeing and teeth-brushing."
4. "Did you do it? Do you need help?"
5. Allow him 5 minutes. Be wiling to help him not just bark at him.
6. If he's doing it say, "Great work. Meet me at the bottom step."
7. While helping with shoes, ask if he needs a drink.
8. Once shoes and coat are on ask if there is a book or toy he'd like to bring along.
9. Immediately enlist him as support for his sibs. Praise him lavishly for his timeliness.
(If Manny and Benici have a conflict during any of these steps, gently urge them of how much time they have spent arguing. Don't intervene. Consequences for fighting will be privilege suspension.)

Culinary Adventures

We've made 4 apple cakes from my friend Margaret from Boston's amazing recipe. She gave me that recipe when I was pregnant with Benici. I disgraced myself with it at home group, slathering it with this custard that she served beside the cake, in a little ceramic pitcher that was still warm. We made two for folks who just had babes, one star-shaped one for our neighbors, and of course one for us to devour.

Also, we made chocolate chip cookies as a way of saying goodbye to our Halloween candy. Each kid had to offer their most chocolatey best pieces for the greater good. They turned out crazy chewy but yummy (especially with a mug of decaf.)

Beauty, Found or Made

"If I were younger, I might be thinking/about something I heard at a party,/about an unusual car,// or the Press of Saturday night,/but as it is, I am simply conscious,/ an animal in pajamas," -from Billy Collins' Night Letter to the Reader

I realized that there is a whole blog scene of women, mothers even, who make things and blog about them. Recipes for faux sushi made with twinkies. Thrifted quilts from the sixties. Fabric dolls with flannelly experssive faces. There are even Flickr accounts of folks who document their home improvements. I can't believe that I am living in a time when you can follow the home improvements someone is making on a little flat in Amsterdam, or watch someone sew a pom-pom fringe of a guest room blanket in Odense!
Anyway, I was noticing how, in comparison, my blog is so introspective and maybe kind of myopic?! I don't know, I know I've seen really ranty blogs and I think, "Do you really need to be so angry about this? or It seems like you just wish they'd asked you to be on Frontline, I'm sorry but I don't really think you were in the running." Or I have seen other blogs and I don't want to sound braggy or showy. I've been doing this for a while now, and I have decided that what I want my blog to be is like from one of our family's favorite films "Running on Empty" (my favorite performance of River Phoenix) and River is trying to prepare his girlfriend (Martha Plimpton) for his mother's birthday dinner. He explains to her that there is no buying of gifts in their family, that all the gifts are found or made. Anyway, she finds this sea shell and makes a necklace out of it. I want this blog to be what their families gift-collection might be: a totally unexpected treasure from the woods or a collage made from wood chips on a styrofoam packing tray, a little bit of home-made redemption in the crazy struggle of life.

I admit I do this for me, to kind of summarize or bundle up a little moment and express it. Maybe to keep it alive. To share it with loved ones still in Boston or folks from college days, or even neighbors I see who wonder what goes on in my head. I want to be like the writer in Billy Collins' poem, a conscious animal in pajamas. I am not really a craftmama, although I am so taken with those blogs. I guess I am a writer, a little too encumbered right now to be in the publishing game, maybe a little afraid of the publishing, MFA game. But I still am a creature that needs to be putting out my stuff.

Photo was taken by Geoff at St. John the Divine in Mornigside Heights

Little Mama

Last week, I was co-oping at the nursery school and Clara was trying to bring her baby doll outside. She climbed the step to the outside backwards and lowered herself onto the path. Then she backed herself onto the step outside. She sat down and began to breast-feed her baby doll. I couldn't tell what she was doing until I moved toward her and she was making suckling noises with her mouth and looking down at her baby.

There she was, looking into her baby's eyes and lovingly feeding her. Oh, my, I am biting my lip.

Falling for Fall

We had home group at our house for the first time in a long time. Folks were gathered around our table eating squash soup, two chilis, and one chicken soup, foccacia and sourdough (all homemade!). I think there is nothing like folks around your table eating food we all made. The lights from Clara's family party, sphere-bulb Christmas lights were strung around the dining room and we were discussing, of all things, Communion. Anne Lamott refers to a Ray Carver short story where after tragic and strange turns of events, myriad folk end up around a counter at a bakery as the day dawns. This is communion, doing this mysterious act of remembrance but also this act of feasting on salvific bread and wine because you are spiritually famished. Anyway, as I looked around last night, I thought, yeah, let's do a lot of this this fall.

Other hopes for the fall:
-to wrestle the thicket in the backyard and dispose of those vines
-to put the crocus and tulip bulbs in the ground before it freezes
-to go for leaf hikes at Kitchen's Lane
-to obtain a cord of firewood
-to finish sewing the table runners from Clara's friends' birthdays
-to perfect Lisa's pumpkin soup recipe
-to put together some nice hand me downs to donate to the Maternal Wellness Center's new "gently used" section

Probably a list long enough for two seasons. Some things will get done. Others will just have to be let go. Such is the nature of fall.

Photos: Kids at a Costume/Birthday Party and Geoff and sons in the sincerest pumpkin patch

Home School, Prep School, Unschool

As I write this, we have an application at one local school of the Quaker tradition. I am also reading “A Well-Trained Mind,” which is about doing classical education at home. Here again, we are at a crossroads: who are we, what do we believe and how do we make that bite-sized for our children? I vacillate between wanting to claw and connive for Manny to get onto the conveyor belt to the ivy league AND trying to teach and shepherd him in our faith, to try and live a life like Christ, who was homeless and who was not impressed with pristine institutions of learning.

I guess secretly, my wish is to be a hand-made, home-made kind of mom, tons of hands-on work, tons of face-time with my kids, making elaborate and time-consuming projects, sitting on the floor drawing AND THEN have them test in for Masterman and have them be way ahead of the curve and then I’ll have these 16 yr. old Ivy-bound kids with an array of options before them. Like, “Mom, Dad, I think I want to lead a sailing team around the Ivory Coast but I don’t know if that’s unwise and I should just take the fellowship at Curtis Institute and keep practicing my music. I promise I’ll be back in New Haven for orientation.” We had a playdate today and I found myself talking schools with the other mother. Talking of applications and interviews and recs from their current teacher: our sons are 5!!

I don’t know, I guess I write this just to scribble down a little snapshot of our life now. I write for long-distance friends who follow this little blog. I wish they could talk to Manny right now, get a sense of how hard this is, deciding. He is complex and sensitive and I don’t want to jeopardize my relationship with him to do the homeschool path only to permanently bruise and wound him and send him to GFS in a year. But we keep thinking, if we have to pay 13K for kindergarten, it had better be a life-changing, super-stimulating but gently nurturing mind-blowing, phenomenal kindergarten! I have peaked in on the local homeschool groups and run into a few moms. All well-meaning, all with cute swarming broods around them. I just keep thinking that I am not them either. I can’t really knit, I love red meat, and my hair has never been longer than my shoulders.

I think we’ll find our way, we always seem to. In PA, you don’t have to report any kind of schooling until they’re 8 so I figure I have at least that much time.

It’s been too long since I posted so I thought I would check in here and give a little review of our summer:  June highlights- the harrowing move out of Duval St. Adri, Elli and their pals riding with the van doors open with our mattresses jutting out, Shessy nursing baby Lucia on our floor in front of the ac because we had no furniture, the MARGE home group outserving eachother by helping us move on consecutive nights, 2 Nursery School Dads talking jazz and walking our dining table down the street at 11pm.  A phenomenal weekend of yummy food, amazing Lego construction, and sharing the baggage and joy of family life  at Stone Harbor with the Zapf’s whose generosity is always humbling. Manny will never forget being at the helm! Closing on Duval St.-- Chris Plant’s real-estate mojo was savvy and lucky and smart and helped us sell our house AND scored us the house of our dreams and a sweet rennovation loan.   July highights- Not that this is totally appropriate for the list but it’s in the interest of catching up and reviewing what our summer was like, we said goodbye to Geoff’s Grandpa Beatty on July 25th.   He was so sick and the way he passed was peaceful.  It’s painful how much we miss him but this is the small price for keeping his memory with us.  Manny’s United Nations Party at BSC-  the bindi-wearing children in their swimsuits batting a blueberry pinata was surreal and perfect!  8 amazing days back in Boston visiting the folks it hurt to leave 3 yrs ago.  Swimming in Walden Pond, disgracing ourselves on fish and chips at James’ Gate, drawing with Marly Mae, getting shoulder rides through Central Square, our super Freestar rental car, driving down the J-way toward Mass Pike laughing at the financial bondage that we left behind, and feeling more stable and more convinced that we should be in Philly.  August-  Ultrasound for our baby #4!  We saw our littlest one on August 7th and will actually meet him/her in Feburary.  We are overwhelmed and excited at this new life rounding out our crew.  Clara Margot’s first steps!  Our intrepid, tiny girl is really walking now!  She ‘s topping out at 9 steps.  She wears a look of determination and slight mischief.  Manny Day’s literacy-explosion.  The first word he read was “HOME” in the bathroom at the Cloisters in NYC.  Words he’s writing: “FRJ” for fridge “FRNR” for furniture.  And being part of the team to design a hard-wearing kitchen and watching it come together- guys interrupting our story times asking if we want double molding around the windows. 
    Wow, what a long up and down summer it has been!  I know I could have done a post about each specific thing in the list but the intensity of moving, the grief of losing Grandpa, and crossing into the second trimester of pregnancy s have me dizzy and flustered.  I apologize if you are hearing about some of these things for the first time through this blog.  My social correspondence for this past summer would merit a C minus.  Also, if this, in some way seems braggy or rambling, I write to count our blessings not to alienate.  We are souls-in-progress,  recipients of God’s goodness living on the thread of his mercy.