Articles from June 2008

In the most recent edition of Conceive magazine (of which I am not a proponent in general, but it had some interesting articles) I learned of the potentially hazardous effects on our children’s fertility from certain household cleaners!

In short, things to avoid are: fragrances, petroleum-based surfactants, and solvents. You can read more about the results of the recent study’s findings here. To give you a taste, though, here is a tidbit about the dangers of fragrances I found compelling: ” The manufacturers want you to smell the fragrance when you open the box, when you use the product, and then later when you smell the clothes…. However, fragrances in nature disperse quickly; phthalates bond the fragrance to the clothing so you keep smelling it.” Scary. Another group of chemicals, alkyl phenoxy ethoxylates (APEs) are found in many laundry detergents and some of them are actually ingredients in spermicide as well. Enough said!

So, what are we to do? What are some favorite brand names or, better yet, recipes for safe home cleaning options that will not endanger our chances of becoming grandmothers?!

Today I awoke to the not-so-refreshed, not-so-get-up-and-go mommy doldrums.  I was tired.  Actually, I was pooped.  We have been overextending ourselves lately, dashing off to various summer events.  This week, our 3-year-old has been immersed in a local Bible school, which meets every morning at a church 20 minutes away.  This means the family has to get up, get dressed, get fed, and head out the door by 8:15am (and that’s while lugging around my 34-week pregnant self!)  The homeschooling option has never looked so attractive!

Please lift this amazing family up in prayer today as they grieve the loss of their 7 month-old baby girl. Their love of God and their love of baby Cate is a blessing for us all.

Lord, May you shower all families grieving the loss of a child with your grace and peace. Amen.

In response to your requests, below is my granola recipe. What I love about granola is that you can really add anything to it (alright, not anything, but a lot of things). I have found that experimenting and omitting or adding things that I know my family likes makes the best granola for us. Here are the basics of what I use:

Dash, apparently thinking himself quite clever, recently called his Grandma by her first name. She thought it was quite funny that he had picked up on what her name is and asked if he knew Grandpa, Daddy and Mommy’s names. He correctly identified Grandpa and Daddy, but announced that Mommy’s real name was, “Babe!”

In Dash’s defense, Mr. Incredible usually walks in the door and says, “Hi, Babe, how was your day?” It made me pause to realize just how much he picks up without any effort or thought.

Several sources have recently left me thinking about how our children really learn about our faith and build character. Being the checklist kind of person I am, I get excited when I read the kids books about saints and virtues…surely I am imbuing them with faith and character, no?

• Monday’s reflection in In Conversation with God quoted Saint Augustine, “Strive to acquire the virtues you think your brothers lack, and then you will no longer see their defects, because you yourselves will not have them.”

• Charlotte Mason speaks constantly about the atmosphere in the home. Karen Andreola quotes Charlotte, “Ideas are held in that thought environment which surround the child as an atmosphere, in which he breathes in unconscious ideas of right living emanating from his parents. Every look of gentleness and tone of reverence, every word of kindness and act of help passes into the thought-environment, the very atmosphere which the child breathes.”

• In her introduction to Catholic Truths for our Children, Patti Armstrong writes, “To pass down information, we teach it intellectually; but to get our children to integrate that knowledge into a belief system demands our own good example…yes, we need to impart knowledge, but we also need to be living examples.”

• And finally, in Heartfelt Discipline, Clay Clarkson discusses his revelation that raising godly children is not just about sowing seeds of good character: “The task is not to plant enough good seeds to crowd out the world’s weedy influences; it’s about faithfully preparing the soil of our children’s hearts,” so that they can be changed by Christ.

All of these relate to Monday’s gospel reading about removing the plank from our own eye before removing the speck from our brother’s (or son’s or husband’s) eye. It took me reading about the same idea half a dozen times to for the thought to crystallize in my 8 month pregnant mind. Perhaps it is more effective, though far more difficult, for me to exhibit the virtue of patience than to read a picture book to my boys about it. I realize that this is not an earth-shattering observation, just something I have been thinking about this week.

At lunch, as I turned around to get some (not eco-friendly and not destined for a compost pile) paper towels to wipe Jack-Jack’s hands, I found that Dash had placed his glass lunch plate on top of his glass cup and was saying excitedly, “See, Mommy!” I took a deep breath, working on exercising the virtue of patience rather than just talking about it.

Then he added, “Just like Father Phillip does it!” so proud of his recreation of the paten on the chalice.

I am so glad that I help my tongue in that moment. I calmly explained that, yes, Father Phillip does do that during mass, (and that if he became a priest, he could, too) but that we shouldn’t do that with our milk and lunch plate.

Trying to cultivate an atmosphere in our home that invites Christ and his Blessed Mother rather than preaching all day long is a much better way to bring our little ones closer to God!

For all the families out there with Jardin cribs, take note of the recent recall.  

Yes, they are. But this is worse. I am too overwhelmed to comment right now — have at it Ladies.

Thanks, Red, for posting your salsa recipe. I also totally agree with your comment from the Organic Living post that we can save a lot of money and also improve nutrition by cooking alot from scratch.

I make my own salad dressings, I was raised on simple viniagrettes and so I tend to be shocked when I see the huge salad dressing aisle, I wonder who is buying all of this dressing!

I use a store bought cruet and I just use the oil and vinegar lines on it. I use either safflower or olive oil with either balsamic or Braggs apple cider vinegar, a spoonful of dijon mustard, some dried herbs and a little bit of honey or sugar. I make a big bottle about once a week and eat it all week. I have also recently started washing a whole head of lettuce at a time and keeping it in the salad spinner in the fridge — I am more likely to have salad at lunch if the lettuce is ready to go.

I have learned from my husband to keep salads interesting by putting in lots of random stuff, so we often have nuts or seeds, fruit (apple, grapes, craisins or raisins), a mix of vegetables (red peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, etc) and or cheese on our salad. I don’t really love expensive mesclun mixes, so I use either red or green leaf lettuce. You can theme it up, go Italian with roasted red peppers and mozzarella in your salad, add crumbled bleu cheese, walnuts, diced apples and raisins to feel like you are at a restaurant, etc.

Do you have simple things, like salad dressing or salsa, that you could buy but make yourself instead? We buy a whole wheat pancake mix, but I am thinking that I could just mix up bags of my own and keep them in the freezer, we do this with the dry ingredients for our bread already, so the kids can make the bread without having to measure (and spill) the flour.

Tomatoes are almost in season, so here is my very simple fresh salsa recipe, you can either blend these ingredients in a food processor, or my preference is to dice them up:

2 ripe farm fresh tomatoes
1/4-1/2 of an onion (preferably sweet or red onion)
2T cilantro (fresh)
1 clove garlic
1 jalepeno (more or less for spice)
salt to taste
juice of 1/2 a lime (optional)

You can make this salsa sweet by adding a mango (delicious as a sauce on fresh fish (like Tilapia)

If anyone has added tips or other great salsa recipes, feel free to leave them in the comments.

I recently befriended a woman in town with 2 children of similar age to my kids. We met at story hour, and after a few chats it was obvious to me that this woman was a serious Christian who attended church regularly and cared deeply about the religious upbringing of her children. We chatted effortlessly about church, local school choices, homeschooling, and cloth diapers, among other topics. As the spring session of story hour ended, we decided to make a playdate for our children to get together. We did so, the kids played nicely, and we decided to get together again. About 1 week later this woman called me with a minor “emergency.” Her 18 month old son had slammed his hand in the door and she needed to take him to the doctor for an x-ray. She couldn’t bring her 3 yr. old daughter, and so she asked if I could watch her daughter for a couple of hours. Sure, I agreed, and within minutes her daughter was playing happily with my children in the backyard.

As I sat and watched the children play, I realized that my new friend had done something that I am very hesitant to do: she asked for help. If the situation had been reversed, would I have called her up and asked her to watch my children while I took one kid to the doctor? We had only had one playdate after all. No, I would not have asked. I probably would not have asked after 10 playdates. I would have asked my mother or husband to take off from work, or I would have waited until I could pay a babysitter in the later afternoon hours. But why?

Is it because I’m Catholic and the community at most Catholic churches is a far cry from ideal. My new friend is an Evangelical, and since I’m a convert to Catholicism, I do remember a greater sense of community in my old Evangelical days. I think this might be a part of it, and possibly the topic of another post, but I don’t think this is the real reason I don’t ask for help.

Rather, the reason is pride.

After all, if I ask for help I come across as someone who doesn’t have their act together. Asking my mother or husband is different, as they know I don’t have everything together, but to ask a new friend, or even an old one, is tantamount to saying that I NEED the help of others, and that takes me out of my comfort zone. Somehow in my mind it’s ok to ask family, but somehow not ok to ask other friends, even other Christian friends who share my beliefs. I see myself as a leader, a rescuer, a helper, a woman who those in trouble can turn to and ask for advice or help. How can I be this woman and then need other people to help me?

I always complain about the lack of community in our individualistic suburban society. Every man or family for himself. Back in the day, when your barn burned down and caused a burden too heavy for one family to shoulder, the community chipped in and re-built the barn. Today we have fire insurance, and a culture where each family (or each person) is expected to shoulder their own burdens–or pay someone to do it for them. Asking a neighbor or friend to help is somehow less than ideal. But it is this very interdependence that makes a real community. We have to need one another.

In the past, I was a person always willing to offer help–and I felt that, by offering, I was somehow working towards building a real sense of community in our church and town. And I am. But community isn’t just about offering and giving, it is also about receiving, and doing so graciously. I can’t have “real” relationships with people if I am giving, giving, giving, but not also opening myself up to asking and receiving.

And that brings me back to my new friend. By asking for help she started a real relationship with me and did more to build community than the 50 unaccepted offers of help I have given out in the past several months. And that is an important lesson for all of us type-A mommies!

My new friend recently invited me to a get together at her home. I politely declined the invitation, as we have a very busy week. I explained in an e-mail how busy our family was this week, and she immediately responded by asking if she could watch the kids for me so that I could run some errands. My gut reaction was, “no, I don’t need her to inconvenience herself and watch my children, besides, I would be leaving her two kids and she only left me one.” And then I realized that if I don’t take her up on her offer, she will be hesitant to ask anything of me in the future, and I will put a stop to the great community web that I desperately want to be a part of building. And besides, I really can use the help!