I’m glad I had the extra reminder in the form of the name Gaudete Sunday to try to be cheerful today.
Neither parent was sick enough to stay home, so we each attended a different Mass while the other stayed with the sick kids. I just now realized that I completely forgot to check whether I had a clean pink sweater, and wore purple.
5-year-old “on the spectrum” T was not at all happy about the whole dinner (courtesy of McDonald’s) being by candlelight. On weekdays we just light the candles, add an Advent prayer before grace, and then blow out the candles before we eat. Although T said he wasn’t actually scared of the dark, I wasn’t sure how we should handle it. Should we show sensitivity to whatever discomfort it was causing him to the point of yielding our plans to his upset, or would giving in only reinforce his felt need for things like this to be changed in the future? He was complaining about the candles themselves as well as not being satisfied with the room becoming less dark after my husband turned on the light in the adjacent kitchen, but demanding instead the light on above the dining room table. Because he was so adamant we weren’t sure he wouldn’t physically go for the (artificial) wreath with the lit candles (I was holding the wreath as far from him as possible on the small table,) my husband decided to turn on the dining room light and see if he would calm down, and he did.
But shortly afterward, the pink candle paint on the newly lit third candle started to turn black because the wax was dripping on it, and the flame looked concerning, so he had to blow it out anyway. We also blew out the other two candles, long before dinner was over. Oh well.
After dinner while D curled up on the couch waiting for his fever reducer to take effect, we put on the “A Christmas for Little Children” video. Later, we all had ice cream for a snack with Catholic Christmas Classics playing in the background. We had five flavors to choose from thanks to a buy two, get three free sale. I decided not to make a point of trying to get everybody to eat pink ice cream because that really is off the point. Besides, the all-natural strawberry ice cream we have is only very light pink and the cherry ice cream we bought turned out to be quite purple.
My husband and D made the pink construction paper bows to add to the purple paper chain decoration draped above and across the dining room window shade.
We’ve begun skipping the often fairly lengthy Scripture readings recommended with the plans for our particular set of Jesse tree ornaments, instead just acknowledging the meaning of the picture on each ornament, and we have replaced the family decade of the Rosary with a single Hail Mary. We may return to the original plans and practices, but we always have two kids who just can’t be expected to pay anything like full attention or participate anywhere near fully, recently we’ve had this mild illness, and often we have difficulty getting everything done as early as is conducive to a good bedtime for the kids. I’m trying never to confuse things that are good but optional with obligations.
Visit hostess Mary for her Boring Post and the links to more.
People are sick here. We’ve got one kid on antibiotics for an ear infection and two more being observed. Seems like we parents are probably also sick. We will have to attend separate Masses without any children tomorrow, unless one or both of us become sick enough to stay home.
It’ll be the third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete or “Rejoice” Sunday, and we’ll be adding some pink to the decorations, and some Christmas music to our preparations.
I bought December’s Magnifikids at a local Catholic bookstore, but for the first Sunday in December, the second Sunday of Advent, we forgot to bring the December 6 issue. Tomorrow D won’t be there to use the December 13 issue. Fortunately, he enjoys reading them outside of Mass.
This one could also be called a formless post for Saturday.
Hosted at ConversionDiary.com. Visit Jen for more quick takes and the links to everyone who’s posting them.
1. (I’m about to do something kind of embarrassing: take what developed spontaneously from my seventh take asking whether boring takes were better than no takes at all, and post it as #1 before those probably more boring takes, in case anyone actually finds it interesting who would otherwise have clicked away before getting to it. If you read this “take” you might understand why.)
Are really boring takes better than no takes at all? It’s an honest question. I ask myself why I want to blog when there seems to be so little that I am comfortable saying here. I guess I have to write to “find my voice,” so I am just writing what I can.
I’m borrowing a thought that Betty Duffy quoted in her 7 Quick Takes today from a comment Sally Thomas left on another post on Betty’s blog:
And any time I’m writing, or thinking for that matter, I’m always talking *to* someone. Sometimes it’s a real, actual person whom for whatever reason I’ve taken as Muse du Jour; sometimes it’s an imaginary reader. But there’s always a reader, ie a listener to my monologue.
Yes! This is so much how I think, why I want to blog or even just plain “write,” and why I’m not very comfortable actually blogging.
On my first-ever website back around 1997, I had a survey. I’d always wanted to take surveys and HTML forms let me do so. One of the questions asked how the respondent thought. I don’t remember the exact choices, but they were something like: in words; in sentences; in images; in feelings; or in a combination of images, feelings, words, and imagined scenes. The last was my own choice. An acquaintance chose sentences and I argued that I didn’t believe him. I didn’t think it was possible to simply think sentences “to” yourself. The choice I didn’t think to include is what makes up a majority of my thoughts now and probably did back then too, which was the type of thinking Sally described in the above quote. An imaginary monologue “to” someone else, made up largely of sentences, of course. Though, back then, I probably imagined many more conversations in those “imagined scenes” or whatever the term was that I used, because back then I still had the meeting of the husband and the proposal and the wedding and the new motherhood to imagine. And occasionally the future as a singer or actress. Now those things are either in the past or real or just not on the agenda anymore, and the reminiscing about the parts that did happen is mostly done aloud or in writing (or typing) to others, or in more monologues in my head.
2. I almost put up a Second Friday of Advent post, but I had nothing new to say and knew these Quick Takes would be difficult enough to get posted.
3. I’ve been trying this year not to let my Advent consist largely of being grouchy about how other people think it’s the Christmas season when it’s not yet. This effort has been fairly successful.
4. For the first time this year we are planning an Epiphany gathering. I’m really looking forward to it.
5. My kids have seen “A Christmas for Little Children” and VeggieTales’ “The Toy That Saved Christmas” so far this season. With Gaudete Sunday two days from now, we’ll start playing more Christmas music, but I hope not to increase the TV viewing saying it’s for Christmas preparation purposes.
6. Speaking of Christmas music, 7-year-old D performed last night at what my husband described as his first “gig.” His piano teacher’s students had the opportunity to play for residents of an assisted living home. Since our 5-year-old was sick, I had to stay home with him and our toddler, but I hear that D’s performance of his first song (which my husband forgot to film) was “flawless” and the second one was pretty good, too.
7. I recently found someone who was using my former blog name and the name of this domain for her blog name before I thought of it! We have some common interests, too. There’s definitely more to read on her blog than on mine lately.
My husband and 7-year-old son made another purple construction paper chain which is draped across the top of our dining room baker’s rack.
We opened the first window on the Advent calendar tonight.
Nothing else new about our Advent observance today (or, by now, technically yesterday.)
My husband and D made a purple paper chain and strung it across the dining room window shade. We also decided to keep the wreath out on the middle of the dining room table during the day since the baby cannot yet reach it there. That and the Advent calendar hanging on the dining room wall will probably be extent of our Advent decoration, at least until Gaudete Sunday. Although I did also hang on the refrigerator the coloring page T did today from Holy Heroes Advent Adventure. D did a crossword puzzle from the same site.
We are lighting the first candle on the wreath to pray every night before dinner, but eating by candlelight only on Sundays. The desire not to buy too many candles was the original motivation for this, not the also existing desire to emphasize the specialness of Sunday.
We prayed the St. Andrew Christmas anticipation prayer after our family decade of the Rosary this evening.
Our Advent calendar doesn’t have the exact days of this year’s Advent, so we will begin using it tomorrow, the first of December.
Yay! We did things for this first Sunday of Advent, in addition to attending Mass, of course. It was the 5 p.m. Mass, and we didn’t do anything else “for Advent” until we arrived home for a dinner of my husband’s pre-cooked and reheated baked penne, by the light of one Advent candle on our artificial wreath(and a little more filtered in from elsewhere in the house.) My husband read an Advent wreath prayer before grace, and we sang “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”
After my husband did the corresponding Scripture reading, 5-year-old T placed the first ornament on the Jesse tree. That will be his task this year.
We also prayed a decade of the Rosary as a family.
I printed out a couple of pages from the Holy Heroes Advent Adventure, but we didn’t have time for the boys to do them tonight since we got started so late and D was busy writing a post about our Thanksgiving on his password-protected blog.
What we haven’t done is decorate. I am looking for ideas, very simple ideas.
Hosted at ConversionDiary.com. Visit Jen for more quick takes and the links to everyone who’s posting them.
1. The decade’s almost over! The retrospectives should be interesting. I wonder when they’ll start being published, or have I missed the early ones? This decade never did acquire a name other than the 2000s.
It’s been a big 10 years for me. It’s the decade in which I got married and all my children (so far) have been born. I did begin “dating” my husband just before the end of the last century, by which I mean 1999. We both recently forgot our 10-year “dating” anniversary. How could he!
2. RDI takes time and I haven’t been devoting enough to it. I canceled my latest call that was scheduled for tomorrow so that we could be more prepared to get something out of the discussion with our consultant.
3. I started this late last night and forgot all about it. It’s now 1:59 p.m. on Friday.
4. Do you ever marvel at how you learned as much as you did before the Internet? Are we really more informed now? Maybe I have more information that is less important about more subjects. But when I was motivated to learn about a subject, I seemed to find as much or almost as much quality information just from what was available without the Web.
5. I tried to post from my BlackBerry the other night while riding in the car (I said riding — I was not the driver! I don’t drive at all.) I got confused navigating the WordPress posting page and ended up abandoning the effort, which was probably for the best, as I had no real ideas and was attempting “haiku” about the act of blogging from a BlackBerry while a passenger in a car on a rainy night. Ugh.
6. Six titles from my drafts folder: Love, Baby Steps, Toy Catalog, Will Work for Butterflies, Pretend Memes for Tuesday, and 7 Quick Takes Friday.
7. I’m just going to click publish now.
“When I grow up, I’ll name two of my sons Alvin and Simon.”
“That’s a bad idea, naming your sons after cartoon chipmunks.”
“Well, actually, Simon was Peter’s name before he became Peter.”
“OK, what about Alvin?”
“Alvin… that’s just a name that I would like.”
I must say, I don’t blog “for me,” and I have never understood the concept. If I knew there was no chance anyone else would ever read this, it would not be public. Honestly, I love the idea of having some kind of community, however small, of readers who have some interest in what I write. I won’t scrupulously accuse myself of horrible egotism for that. Some little, everyday blogs have some value. I’m not trying to do anything grand, but if I enjoy what some other amateurs have to offer in their little spaces on the Web, why not try to offer something similar? I do not think I am doing that yet, but it’s the goal.
I doubt that I would be very interested in my own blog if I were someone else, but I’m not sure. With Google Reader, I would probably bookmark it in case this person who had some common interests with me ever posted something other than, “So I’d like to blog, but what do I write? Hmm…” The ellipses and scare quotes would bother me less than they do when I am the one typing them, but some of the content would probably be even less interesting than I find it as its writer.
Seems to be the only way for me right now. Oh, and I need ideas for posts. I really do feel like writing again though…
I wonder if Jen at Conversion Diary would give me permission to rename my blog “Quick Takes Every Day.”
Thing is, quick takes may be interesting mainly if you already find the blogger interesting, or useful if they give you an idea that there is more in-depth stuff by that blogger that you might like to read. So if the blogger never writes in-depth stuff…
Well, there’s always “Boring Posts Every Day,” if Mary will give me permission.