Why are you reading this blog when you could be reading Camp Patton?
Camp Patton, the reason God gave us mommyblogs
I’m still in the land of Can’t Deal over here, which is good news for you since my inability to form words with my keyboard* has prompted me to do another undiscovered gems** post where I enlighten you about internet awesomeness of which you may have been heretofore unaware. Today’s gem: Camp Patton!
I don’t know whether it’s been good or bad for me that I discovered Grace Patton’s blog. On the plus side, her dry humor and concise writing style bless me with posts that don’t take a lot of time to read but always leave me either laughing, crying (from laughing), or shouting “SOMEONE ELSE UNDERSTANDS MY LIFE!” at my computer monitor. On the down side, I spent way too much time hitting Refresh on her homepage to see if she’s updated, and have a nagging sense that I cannot consider my life complete until I have read every post in her archives.
Not only has her Simon Says series convinced me that her husband and mine were separated at birth, but it has inspired other bloggers to round up “best of” quotes from their husbands that are equal in excellence (that last link coins the term “snacking trousers” — don’t miss it). Grace also introduced me to the use of the term “pre-game” as a verb, is crafty in ways that people like me can only imagine, and even manages to be funny about thyroid cancer.
And for the bonus round, her husband Simon is in residency to become an OB-GYN specializing in Natural Family Planning***. How cool is that? And just listen to how she suffers so that Simon can one day provide the world with quality pro-life medical care:
I’ve been moving one step forward and two steps back in the housework, patience, and personal appearance realms. Armed with a broom and baby wipes, I’m in a constant war with Julia’s breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, snack, dessert, snack leftovers strewn about the house. Julia is put in her timeout spot more frequently every day for bopping Sebastian over the head. And while I was filling out paperwork at a recent appointment, I was asked if I worked outside the home with a tone that makes me fairly certain the kind gentleman had already clicked, “no!!!!” using my momfit (ill-fitting jeans, sweater over turtleneck and one pearl in left ear) and mom scent (casserole of spit up, toddler breath and a perfume mask) as telling indicators.
So, there you go. I recently emailed Grace and promised to share my husband’s super secret margarita recipe that he’s spent years perfecting (YEARS) if she promises to update her blog twice a day, so hopefully there will be many more posts to come. Enjoy!
* I’ve hired a trained monkey to write my Register posts.
** I know, I know, someone is going to point out that everyone already reads Grace Patton’s blog and it’s not exactly “undiscovered.” I simply mean “undiscovered by me,” and “I spend an embarrassing amount of time staring at her website and wanted to share it with you all but didn’t know how else to categorize such a post so I put it in ‘undiscovered gems.’”
*** Yes, I did have to double-check to make sure I knew that because Grace said it publicly and not from Google stalking her.
7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 172)
First of all, thank you so much for the kind words and well wishes. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the prayers and support you’ve offered both for my neighbors and for me. I can’t speak for anyone else involved, but I know that I am still working through it, and it may be a while before things go back to normal — or, rather, until we settle into a new normal. I appreciate you bearing with me as I navigate through all of this.
For those of you in the Austin area, on Monday (5/21) I have the honor of joining Professor Robert Koons as part of his apologetics series at St. Louis parish. The event starts at 7:00 PM and should involve some great discussions. Hope you can join us!
My seven-year-old son has surprised us by showing a huge interest in learning Chinese. I found a poster of Chinese characters on sale somewhere and put it up in our homeschool room. The act of tacking it to the wall represented about 99% of our homeschool language curriculum this year, but my son took the initiative to learn about this language, and more than once I found him studiously copying the characters and trying to memorize their meaning.
I’m going to run with this and have decided that his big summer learning project will be to pick up some Chinese. (When he will have the opportunity to practice it, I have no idea. Maybe I’ll talk Jen Ambrose into letting us Skype with her kids.) Anyway, I’m adamant that the only method I’ll use is Pimsleur. I’m a huge fan of their approach, for reasons I’ll elaborate on in a moment, but here’s a video that summarizes their philosophy:
(And let me add that I have no affiliation with them and was not asked to promote their product. Though if they want to send me a check or an Ikea gift card for plugging their product that would be fine.)
I used some Pimsleur tapes to pick up some Czech before a trip we took to the Czech Republic a long time ago, and that’s when I became convinced that it’s extremely important not to see a language written while you’re learning it. To interpret written words uses a different part of your brain than mimicking sounds and associating them with concepts, and I think it throws everything off when you combine the two. I only listened to those Czech tapes for two weeks back in 2002, and I still remember almost everything I learned. Which is really handy, since here in Texas I’m constantly needing to ask where the subway station is in Czech.
You know what’s frustrating? When you get all excited about learning a language before a trip so that you can converse with the locals…then realize that you learned the wrong *$&%! language. On that trip to the Czech Republic my husband and I spent about half our time in a town right next to the German border, and everyone spoke German. The owners of our inn didn’t even speak a word of any other language…which was problematic, since we didn’t know any German. (Well, I did know a couple of curse words, and the phrase “good luck,” which would have made an odd combination.)
Anyway, that hot mess reached its apex the afternoon that we tried to explain to them that we had aired up the tires of their loaner bikes. You don’t realize how hard it is to pantomime riding a bicycle until you actually do it; same with using an air pump. We never were able to get across what we’d done, and I’m pretty sure the owners were left thinking that I told them, “I am a galloping horse who sometimes stops to pant while digging ditches.”
Does anyone know of a faith-based support group for mothers who have chronic illnesses? A close friend of mine has a condition that causes her to spend a lot of time feeling fatigued and/or in pain. It’s difficult enough in and of itself, but she reports that one of the hard parts is simply feeling alone in her struggles. I think it would be a boon to her spirits to know that there are other Christian moms going through the same thing. Any resources you could share would be very much appreciated.
I hope you all have a safe and blessed weekend. Thank you again for your support.
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On grief and neighbors
Two weeks ago, I was scheming about moving. I was tired of trying to fit seven people into three bedrooms, tired of the fact that issues with our back yard mean that the kids won’t play out there for long periods of time, tired of scorpions stinging my children in the face. Also, a few weeks ago my seven-year-old son and a boy his age who lives nearby had been involved in what they thought were humorous pranks on our neighbors, but turned out to cause serious property damage. After the humiliating experience of having to knock on doors, introduce ourselves, apologize, and write checks, I was ready to get out of here. We can’t exactly afford to run out and get a bigger house, but I was determined to make something work. I picked up flyers from local houses that had just gone on the market, and trolled real estate websites, hoping against hope to find a spectacularly good deal.
Then, a week ago last Saturday, I was driving home from my mom’s house at 8:45 at night after dropping the kids off for a special spend-the-night with her and a visiting aunt. Her house is within the same connected network of subdivisions that we’re in, and so I was winding through neighborhood streets. Shortly after I turned onto the main drive of our own subdivision, I saw a motorcycle zoom past me, headed the opposite direction. I had just come around a corner, and when I looked at his trajectory and considered how the street curved, my heart sunk. He’s not going to make it, I thought. I hit the brakes and looked in my rear-view mirror. The darkness erupted in a spray of sparks, and I heard a terrible crash.
I turned the car around as I dialed 911. I parked by the accident site and jumped out to check on the rider. I could never have been prepared for the horror of what I would see. Without going into detail, I’ll just say that it was like something you’d see in a war zone. One officer commented that it was one of the worst scenes he’d come across in 20 years. I had trouble breathing, and immediately started going into a state of shock.
After I got off the phone, there was a surreal silence. I was standing next to this horrendous scene, with no authorities having yet arrived. It was just me and this deceased young man, with a couple of other stunned witnesses across the street. For a brief moment, I was pulled out of my shock and given a specific, very clear message: I was supposed to be there, on behalf of this kid’s mother. I was her envoy, there to look after him, to pray for him, and to send him off on to his journey in the next life. A feeling of calm, as thick and palpable as a fog, enshrouded the scene, and I was given the words to say a short prayer for him and his family — specifically, for his mother.
Police sirens broke the silence, and within minutes the street was filled with police, paramedics, neighbors, all walking around in the glare of headlights and flashing red and blue lights. I fell back into my state of shock, and was told by officers to go home.
At my house, I sat with my husband on our back porch and told him everything that happened. As I spoke, I felt a connection with the victim’s mother. “I feel like I know her,” I said. It was an irrational thought: The drive on which the accident happened was one of the main arteries into a large network of neighborhoods that contains hundreds of houses. I don’t know that many people around here. Also, the victim could have been here to visit friends for a Saturday night get-together; he may not have lived anywhere nearby. And yet I felt this sense of connection so strongly that I ran out the front door and stood in the middle of the road and looked down the street toward the house of my neighbor friend who has a teenage son. Her house was dark, and so I went inside.
The next morning after Mass, I got the call. We did know him. It was Cameron, the gregarious 21-year-old son of my neighbor a couple of doors down. When I was standing in the road the night before, I was turned the wrong direction; if I had turned around, I would have seen his mother’s house bustling with grief-stricken visitors, and I would have known.
As more details came out in the following days, it seemed that everyone on our street was involved in this tragedy in some way. Cameron had stopped by one neighbor’s house just minutes before the accident. Another neighbor was the first person he’d shown his brand new motorcycle to. Another neighbor had gone with him when he bought it. I was the first person to find him. Another neighbor was just arriving back from a night out when I came home from the scene, and cried with me as I told her what happened. Other neighbors had been outside because of all the sirens, and were with his mother when the police arrived to deliver the news. Still others were good friends of his.
All last week, I spent most of my time with the people on my street. I wasn’t online at all, and directed all of my energy to interacting with the people whose lives play out just yards away from mine. We stopped and hugged one another on the way to the mailbox, stood and cried on the sidewalks, sometimes right in the middle of the street. When we gathered to walk to the candlelight vigil at the accident site, the first person to greet me was one of the women whose property my son and his friend had damaged. The last time I had seen her I was standing on her doorstep, humiliated and chagrined, thinking that we’d probably never speak again. She walked up to me with tears in her eyes and asked if I was okay, we embraced, we cried, and we walked to the candlelight vigil together.
The night of the funeral a bunch of us gathered outside, sitting on the curb and talking until past 1 AM. We toasted to Cameron, we prayed, we laughed those raw and intense laughs that don’t quite cover over the grief, we cried, and we asked ourselves why we never got to know each other before now. The next day another person approached my house with the biggest bouquet of flowers I have ever seen. I could tell it was a neighbor since there was no car in front of my house, but couldn’t see the person’s face because of the size of this tremendous gift. I opened the door to see Cameron’s mother, accompanied by his sister and step-father. In an act of graciousness almost too shocking to comprehend, she had come by to give me this gift as a token of thanks.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the day before the accident, my husband and I stumbled across an idea for creating some more space in our house that took a lot of pressure off of our overcrowding situation. I had been so fixated on my plans that I had never paused to consider whether it was God’s plan for us to move on from this place. That time may come one day, but this week it was as clear to me as few things have ever been clear to me in my life, that that time is not now. I knew that God sends us to just the right time period in human history, that he sends us our families, but I don’t think that it clicked until this past week that he sends us our neighbors too.
As I talked with Cameron’s family, his mother and I in tears as we spoke, I noticed that his sister was sitting in the same place in my living room that she sat almost four years ago to the day, that afternoon when I first met her and my other little friends. And I had the same feeling that moment last week that I had those years before: this is exactly where I need to be.
7 Quick Takes Friday
Just a quick update to note that Hallie will be guest hosting 7 Quick Takes this week.
Also, if you would like to read the obituary of the young man killed in the accident I mentioned earlier this week, you can find that here. Please pray for his soul, for all who were on the scene and are having difficulty moving past what they saw, and especially for his family and friends, who are understandably devastated.