Articles from June 2010

From today’s meditation from In Conversation with God:

So many people have their own plans for their own wellbeing that only too often they look on God simply as someone who will help them to carry out those same plans. The true state of affairs is quite the opposite. God has his own plans for our happiness, and He is waiting for us to help him accomplish them – and let us be quite clear about it: we cannot improve on God’s plans….He arranges everything in such a way as to make detachment from ourselves and from our future plans easy…so that we become saints.

A lot to pray about here!

A couple of weeks ago, we were having a great discussion about burnout, both with respect to the parents and the children in our families. Many of you made some very thoughtful comments, and I appreciated everyone’s honest and encouraging words.

One of the comments that struck a particular chord with me was written by Juris Mater, regarding hiring help for Mom:

“I have said this before, but I don’t think that hiring help should be an upperclass privilege. I think that setting money aside to hire help for mom is possibly the second most important financial commitment to tithing that a family can make. Tithing is a matter of obedience and abandonment, for the soul of the family. Hiring help for mom is a matter of keeping the heart of the family healthy and thriving.”

Right on, Juris Mater! My husband will be the first person to tell you that I have a hard time asking for help, but I think that I have gotten much better with the addition of each child to our family, out of sheer necessity and through the example of wise mothers whom I respect greatly. After our newest baby was born just four months ago, I realized that I was going to need some help cleaning the house, and it was absolutely wonderful to not worry about those responsibilities for the first couple of months! Now, I have hired a wonderful woman to help me with the children a couple of times a week so that I can clean the house (yes, that’s how much I need a break from my kids!) and run other errands, sometimes with the baby but always without the older children. It’s been great so far. It takes some careful planning on my part, and it took some thought in terms of finding the person who was a good fit for our family, but I think that it has been a great decision so far. Also, I have hired a “mother’s helper” to help me at the pool with my toddler, so that I can tend to the baby and watch my 6 year-old. My mother’s helper is only 10 years old, but she is very attentive and only charges $2 an hour – what could be better!

I am pretty confident that taking action and asking for help with my children has benefited not only me, but also those around me. My husband is relieved knowing that I am getting a break from the children a couple of times a week, so if he has an especially tough week at work and isn’t as available to help, at least he knows that I’m not depending solely on him for a break. It also leaves us more time on the weekends to enjoy time together as a family when I can get chores done during the week. I also think that my friends and close neighbors are relieved to know that I have some help: they see the day-to-day stressors on our family, and have commented that they feel badly that they can’t be more helpful to me. Everyone is busy with their own lives, and it can be hard to integrate another family’s needs into the fabric of another family’s life. Although we might rely on neighbors and close friends to help us out when we are in crisis mode (i.e. a child has to be taken to the emergency room or there has been a death in the family), I do believe that we shouldn’t assume that friends who seem “less busy” will be able to take on the responsibility of caring for our children on a regular basis.

In any case, I am writing this post to encourage all of you stay-at-home mothers out there to ask for help when you need a break. It’s perfectly acceptable to need some time away from the children, even if only for a couple of hours a week. I think that it’s also healthy for children to see that mommy has things that she needs to go and do on her own – children like knowing that their parents have interests that don’t relate directly to them, and it can broaden the scope of the entire family’s perspective. Even if all that you can afford is a gym membership that offers good quality childcare, at least the children will see that mommy exercises for her own health and well-being.

God bless all of you today! Mary, Mother of Good Counsel, pray for us!

Have you noticed that children love watching short videos of other kids?  With this in mind, Mr. Red and I thought it might be fun to have our daughter, Gianna, do a series of videos explaining the commandments.  In case you are wondering, the examples she provides are entirely her own.

This is what happens when our family gets a new video camera and my husband gets a week off from work.

Those of you who enjoyed Red’s post on the Swagger Wagon will appreciate this very funny video entitled “Dad Life,” produced by Church on the Move. I laughed so hard and must admit that I’ve watched it more than once! I hope that you’ll enjoy it as much as I did

Dad Life from Church on the Move on Vimeo.

My 2.5 year old has recently started asking for “my school work” so that he can earn “my o-puter time”.  In our house, each child gets 15minutes on PBSkids.org when their seat work is completed.  So, I know that for next fall he is going to want to do school, but what can I do with someone so little that will not require constant interaction from mom?  I think that 10 minutes would be the max time that he could sit at a desk to do something, right now he does do some montessori-style work but I have to do a lot of demonstrating and he never puts it away by himself.  Maybe Kumon workbooks?  And, how do those Montessori directors get the kids to work so quietly?!  Any suggestions would be appreciated.

We are thrilled to share the following from GG (B-Mama’s husband):

B-Mama delivered MG at 11:23 last night. Our little lady weighed in at 7lbs 14oz, 20.5in, with a head full of jet black hair. Mama and baby are doing great. Pictures and delivery details coming soon! Thanks for all the prayers over the last 40+ weeks, and for rejoicing with us at the arrival of this precious new addition.

At Princeton’s graduation for the Class of 2010, Baccalaureate Speaker Jeff Bezos ’86, CEO of Amazon.com asked the class, “Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?  Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?  I will hazard a prediction: when you are 80 years old and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made.  In end, we are our choices.  Build yourself a great story.”

Charlie Gibson told the class at the Class Day ceremony:
“Above all, I want for all of you to matter…we live in a world that is obsessed by fame…that in the long run is not what matters.  It’s being a force in your community, it’s being a great teacher or coach, it’s ministering to patients or to a congregation, it’s being a great parent, it’s having a positive effect on others, and it’s standing for something.”

At the pan-African graduation ceremony, a professor noted that Princeton would continue to define her graduates, but that they, by their lives, would also define Princeton.

I hope that Princeton’s future will be defined by the lives of her students and alumni who take this advice to heart, who make it a point to be builders and to stand for something.

The life of a military family is full of ups and downs. Great assignments, tough jobs, deployments, new doctors, packing, moving, friends, family.

For the last two years we have been living in a multi-family apartment building in central Germany. This heightens both the challenges and rewards of being an Army family living on an  Army post. On Monday I lost my best, best Army-wife-mom friend. She lived in the same stairwell as me, we had children of similar ages who got along swimmingly. We shared values and passions for reading and being outdoors. We lived through a miscarriage, emergency room visits, a deployment, a two-week trip to Rome and countless family struggles together. Our husbands work late hours, so we regularly spent three hours together on some playground or other in the afternoons. She was my female sanity check, she grounded me. She had a way of saying the same thing my husband was trying to get across to me, but making it more palatable.

So, on Monday she headed back across the Atlantic, with her family of five in tow. My pantry is full of her condiments, dry pastas and diet sodas, but the shelves of my life seem to have gaping holes without her. I know that the richness of our families’ friendship has enriched us all for the long haul, but sometimes the near term seems so bleak. I ask for your prayers for everyone’s healthy adjustments to our new situations

I have a totally unrealistic dream. I imagine me sitting in a chair with an enchanting, living book in hand reading to my three sweet boys who are playing or drawing peacefully and quietly, attentive to the beautiful story, absorbing its language and its richness. I’m sure my husband is laughing across cyberspace quipping to himself, “Maybe I should introduce her to our children.”

I  would love to establish a family read aloud time for longer chapter books, but my attempts thus far have failed unless we are in the car and I am not driving (which happens rarely on the weekends), though we do love to listen to books on cd from the library in the car. I have books upon books that I can’t wait to share with the big boys, who are eager to listen, but we are usually derailed by our 2 year old who is never just content to sit and play with playdoh or do anything, really, that doesn’t involve physical contact with his brothers. If I put him in the pack’n'play he either climbs out or screams.

At home I can rarely make it a sentence or two without some conflict that requires resolution. If we read outside in the tree house, we may make it through the paragraph. My question is how do you handle family read-aloud chapter book time with littles? I mean specific logistics (Really, do you tie your 2 year old up with your 6 year old’s jump rope?) Do you wait until the chief-instigator-2-year-old is asleep (this doesn’t work for us as our biggest boy goes to bed the earliest)? Just wondering if I’m missing some obvious solution!

I know that you all will bear with us as we continue to build this site and try out our new gadgets, and we hope that Building Cathedrals will be a useful favorite destination — tell your friends!  We have been overwhelmed by the number of people who have approached us about what the conversation here has meant to them over the past two years, so we hope to continue and expand here at our new home.  We are thankful for all of your support.

Since we are all getting used to a new format (this blog is now published through WordPress), we may make some mistakes, so let us know if weird things are happening in your browser.

One of the fun things we are working on is a list, visible on the right sidebar, of “shared items”.  Since we are a group blog, we can’t do this through a reader with an RSS feed, but we would love to be able to share items with all of you without setting up an individual post for each one.  Our wonderful, volunteer programmer, Jonathon, is working on this, but if anyone has a tip, please get in touch with one of us.  In the meantime, the list of shared items will just appear as alphabetical links, so I wanted to draw your attention to a new item I have added over there, For Your Marriage.  You may have heard the ads on EWTN or seen posters in your parish asking “what have you done for your marriage today?”  It is a great question, and one of the things that you can do “for your marriage” is to visit the “for your marriage” website.  There are great articles over there.  I really enjoyed the information on different stages of marriage.  We builders are all past our fifth anniversaries now and we have noticed that our marriages have evolved, as children, careers and mortgages make things more complicated, our love has matured and deepened but we may be tempted to take each other for granted.  It is a blessing to know that others feel the same way and to be encouraged to pray together and to renew our bonds of marriage daily.

I am not providing a link here in this post so that you will have to go over to the sidebar and find it, and you will know how to use our “shared items” list.  Check it out, for your marriage!