Thomas's Great Adventure party

 

Last weekend we had Thomas's Great Adventure Party. I was inspired by the thought that he's growing into "storybooks" and bought him two books -- Jan Brett's Gingerbread Baby, a beautiful take-off on the gingerbread boy story, and Stephen Kellogg's Jack and the Beanstalk, a rather traditional rendering with dreamy imagery. Then I planned the party theme from those two books. (He actually got a lot more books, of course, but those were the theme-makers.) Thomas helped me make his poster ahead of time. Yes, that is a picture of him climbing the beanstalk (he was opening a door).

Thomas is loving the books. He made me read Gingerbread Baby 5 times in a row during his party. Here's one of the many.

 

He would only be persuaded away from the book by Indian food. This is a funny story. He was excited about his birthday ahead of time because he has been watching an episode of Word World where Dog has a birthday. He helped me plan his party. He wanted a "blue hat," "books," and "rice." When I asked him what kind of rice, Chinese or Indian, he said "Inyun." It turned out to be harder than I expected to get an Indian restaurant to deliver to our house, but we finally finagled it out of one place because it was a large order:



Thomas also loved playing with his Lego train set. I think we all spent an hour of his party doing that.

Finally the cake. I had my heart set on ice cream cupcakes, since I made them for Dave and Eric's joint birthday celebration and really enjoyed the novelty (and the ease). But I wanted them to go with the theme. So I made gingerbread cupcakes, using the "soft cookie" recipe on the gingerbread box and just filling 1/4" of the cupcake liners (silicone, I'm thinking of giving away all my muffin tins now). After I baked the cookies, I froze them and then let some Edy's Vanilla Bean ice cream defrost. I scooped the ice cream till it mounded. Just before we served them, we sprinkled Wilton's Gingerbread Boy giant sprinkles on top, in red and brown. Thomas thought it was so exciting that he was reading about gingerbread, eating gingerbread, and could see the gingerbread boys on top.

The cupcakes really turned out well. The soft cookies have a better consistency when frozen than the brownies did (they turned out to be too dense) or than cake (I always feel like it tends to get mushy). Here are the mandatory cake photos:

 
 

All in all, it was a very satisfying party for everyone. I don't think I've ever seen Thomas have more fun.

Happy 3rd year of adventures, Thomas!

Rules for life

Thomas gets rules now. A few weeks ago he got rules and so understood that if he did this again, he would get the same reaction out of mom and dad again. That was really frustrating. Now he's moved on to getting rules and knowing that if he doesn't do this again, mom and dad will be pleased with him and he can talk to them about it. This has led to a lot of new sentences being of the "NO [verb]" type around here. Or "NO [word that stands in for a verb]". Or occasionally "NO [sign]". Accompanied by a great deal of head shaking.

"NO. No bite. Dada. No bite. Mama. Vava. NO. [smacks lips] Blue." (The much-abused blue crayon.) "NO. No hot."

This formation also works when the topic is something he doesn't like. Today I tried giving him grapefruit juice. He drank it and said "Yuck!" To do him credit, then he drank it some more, pointed at his tongue, and said, "Yuck!" So I offered to get him another kind of juice, which he was happy about. I went and got some apple juice and gave him his "new. juice!" and after a couple of sips he pointed to the kitchen and said. "NO. No yuck!" That cracked me up, so we both sat around saying "no, no yuck" for a few minutes.

This strikes me as a good rule for life. My goal today is to have a no yuck day.

Indirection

I was walking back to the car from Thomas's daycare this morning and I saw a woman approaching walking a beagle. Middle-aged woman, black, bandanna over her hair, trying to persuade her beagle out of the fascinating bushes and along the sidewalk to whatever their destination was.

When I lived in Urbana-Champaign I would have smiled and nodded at such a woman, said hello or made a comment about the grizzled dog's puppyish behavior. In our neighborhood there, everyone knew everyone, and if you didn't know someone, you knew you were bound to know them sometime, so might as well make small talk.

In the city it's a little different, and the woman wasn't meeting my eyes. So I did the only possible thing. I smiled at her dog, because it was charming and she loved it, and out of the corner of my eye I saw her smile at her dog too.

It was enough.

The difference is

The difference is a polished
blade, edgewise to the eye.
On one side gleams the sun
of time, and on the other
the never-fading light,
and so the tree that stands
full-leaved in broad day
and the darkness following
stands also in the eye
of Love and is never darkened.


The blade that divides these light
mirrors both — is one.
Time and eternity
stand in the same day
which is now in time, and forever
now. How do we know?
We know. We know we know.
They only truly live
who are the comforted.

            - Wendell Berry, Given p. 77

Some days I know that we are those trees, standing in the dark, in a light we cannot perceive.

Some days I only hope so.

Power and authority

Thomas is starting to question our authority. We end up in some kind of power struggle with him much more often than I like. He's curious about discipline and has been putting himself on timeout because he thinks it's interesting (??). Of course, he also deliberately does exactly what we just told him not to do to see what we'll do. This would be just annoying, except that generally when we've outlawed something it's because it's either dangerous or fragile. (As Matt says, "I only say no if it could hurt you or you could hurt it.") Until the last couple of weeks, we could pretty much rely on him not to do something if we explained it was dangerous. Not now.

And then there's this.



Wednesday night he refused to go to sleep in his own bed. (He likes to try to get away with this by offering to put his pillow in the bed with mommy and daddy's pillows -- as if what makes it our bed is our pillows' residence there. We live on their sufferance.) He eventually fell asleep around 11, and woke up at some point during the night and climbed into the bed with us. So there he is Thursday morning exulting over getting to sprawl in the exact middle of the big bed. Sadly, he does try to do this during the night too, moving Matt and I out of "his space" in the middle. The very first thing he does in his sleep is turn horizontally to maximize how much space his body requires.

I also cut his hair last weekend. Here's the before:



And here's the after:



Plenty more pics in the gallery.

Participation as a spiritual discipline at Mar Thoma

Just a quick post. I was not crushed by my grading responsibilities -- I passed Teaching 101 (although one of my students failed :-().

I just want to share an excerpt from my Syro-Malabar paper, to be presented in Heidelberg this fall:

The following answer on the questionnaire expresses the conviction [that participation in the liturgy is a skill which relates directly to ability to commune with God] perfectly: “While saying prayers and singing . . . is a major part of [participation], in the end I feel it is the physical, mental, and spiritual mode one maintains that places them in a spiritual union with the Body of Christ that is the Church and Christ that works through the Church.” [Answer to the question “What does it mean to participate in the Qurbana?” received April 10, 2008.] Compare this with Marcel Mauss's observation on body techniques, quoted by Asad: “I believe precisely that at the bottom of all our mystical states there are body techniques which we have not studied, but which were studied fully in China and India, even in very remote periods . . . . I think that there are necessarily biological means of entering into ‘communion with God’.” [Marcel Mauss, "Body Techniques," quoted in Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 76.] The questionnaire answer suggests, similarly, that ritual techniques consisting of physical and nonphysical actions can conduce to a spiritual experience marked by a perception of divine presence.

I can't get over the phenomenal liturgical and theological sophistication revealed in that boldfaced quote. Granted, this is one of the older youth I interviewed; nevertheless, his response is mostly more articulate than the other answers I got -- it's still representative.

What a lovely project I've been blessed to be able to do.

End of the semester

It's a terrifying fact that in my spreadsheet of class grades, my highest total percentage right now is 38 point something. No, my students aren't failing -- I am.

I have a lot of work left to do before May 12th.

Worten

An update on yesterday's post:

Two days ago, Thomas's "book" was sort of like "boo-t." Last night, though, he had a sudden influx of German influence, and has been saying "buch" with a nice sloppy wet ch sound. Also "mulkkkk" with the same sound. Ach!

Words

Thomas is learning words too fast for me to remember which ones are new. He says one new word every day -- at least, one new word I can recognize, although there's a lot of clearly-meant-to-be-intelligible semi-babbling.

This week: "Bubble," very clearly, pointing at a big soap bubble in the bathtub, followed by huge grins and ecstatic laughter and clapping at his own ingenuity. It's his first clear B-word, and he's been repeating it at intervals just to hear us say, "Yes, bubble!" and laugh with him.

"Poop," said when he had gotten poop on my pants during a diaper change. Not quite so thrilling, but such is life. He was evidently disturbed by this matter-out-of-place. Social conventions are becoming clear to him.

"Book." My husband told me last night he had said this, and I only then remembered that he said it last weekend, too (though not as distinctly as "bubble").

It's a continual pleasure to see how eagerly he's pursuing these tiny pearls of language. It's been hard dropping him off at daycare in the morning -- for me, not him.

I love fieldwork

Yesterday I was at Mar Thoma as usual, but I was giving out questionnaires on Qurbana experience to the youth. I got 62 surveys back and did one interview of a young CCD teacher who got so emotional talking about the East Syrian rite that she started trembling and forgot about the meeting she was supposed to go to.

A girl in my friend's 9th grade class diffidently asked me for my autograph after she had filled out the questionnaire. Bemused, I ended up writing in the front of her CCD notebook thanking her for her help with my research and invoking God's blessings on her. Her answers to the questionnaire were really wise and beautiful.

A young man who just got back from five years in India started teaching me Malayalam. (I had to work hard to make him believe I actually planned to learn it, first.) Nandi!

Today I'm tabulating the results and looking for correlations between the young people's birth place, command of Malayalam, and preferred mass and their way of speaking about the experience of worshiping in the Syro-Malabar rite. I'm having a blast.

I actually think that the reason I'm enjoying this so much is very similar to the reason that Michelle likes washing mugs: each questionnaire, with its handwriting, its unique phrasing, its biographical information, and its futile attempt to constrain the spiritual life to a few brief lines, gives me some insight into the complexity of the wonderful people I've met at Mar Thoma and their relationship to their unique and beautiful liturgical tradition.

Structured procrastination

I was remarking today on how many important professional things I've gotten done in the past couple of months since I stopped working on my dissertation. I've taught my first class (a whole world of impossible demands in itself), updated my CV, applied for a grant, submitted important proposals, begun working on a totally new article for possible publication, and sent a bunch of emails to strangers about important matters that I would normally agonize over for months (in this case, I instead only agonized over them for weeks).

This is not because I've suddenly become a productive person. It's because I'm letting my dissertation atrophy, and I have to do something useful to keep myself from overflowing with panic about it. I found a highly entertaining article about this phenomenon:

The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I'm sure the same is true for most other large institutions. Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article anyway? Not so important that at some point something that seems more important won't come along. Then I'll get to work on it.

Maybe this is why they make me write a dissertation, so I'll get all these other things done. Maybe it's all a ruse, and in the end I won't have to finish it?

Please?

Little helper

Tonight Thomas helped make dinner for the first time. Back in December, he and I made gingerbread cookies, but he "helped" by stirring powdered sugar in a mixing bowl with a wooden spoon and then smashing the rolled-out dough with his fingertips. It was fun, but he didn't understand the process.

Tonight, he got to make pizza! Granted, it wasn't totally from scratch. We bought a ready pizza crust and I made the olive oil and garlic sauce and spread it on. Matt and I chopped the toppings -- but Thomas got to add them himself. He sprinkled the mushrooms first, then the broccoli, then the artichoke hearts, and finally the feta cheese (this is a favorite pizza combination for me that's very, very hard to order). After a minute, he even got the idea that we wanted it to be spread evenly, and we ended up with a pizza just piled with yummy things. It was beautiful and overloaded, and I was so hungry by the time it was done that I forgot to take a picture of it for this post.

Thomas has been eating better lately if we make food at home. He likes to watch the process of cooking and know what's going in the pot (or the oven). I think the smell gets his appetite up too, as he keeps running over and pointing and smacking his lips while everything cooks. Today we turned on the oven light so he could check on the pizza and watch the top beginning to brown. He ate a little of everything, and a lot of crust, feta, and broccoli, but he didn't really care for artichoke hearts. Such a disappointment -- they're one of my favorite vegetables.

This is a good start towards Thomas being as much of a chef as Barnacle Boy. I love it.

Teaching glee

I was pleased with my students' performance on my first-ever midterm exam, but grading the essays has been tedious, a tedium that occasionally falls into frustration at hitherto-unsuspected misunderstandings of key material.

The high points, though, are astonishingly high. After grading a few in a row of "good essay, but it could be better" (I mentally categorize before I think about point values), I hit an essay where every line was clearly revealing the student's excellent understanding of the topic and its connection to the course. I found myself muttering, "Yes, yes... YES!" and I wanted to send a personal email thanking the student for studying so hard. (Of course I won't.)

I can't decide if this is teaching or if I'm nuts.

The continuing saga of gazelles

In a development that is fascinating even while sad, Thomas is now afraid of gazelles, period -- and has qualms about anything that looks (or sounds?) like a gazelle.

From the toy I mentioned before, his fear first spread to a picture in his bestiary. This book is a perpetual favorite. It resides near the potty and can entertain Thomas for a long time. But it has a picture of a gazelle in it. After the Terrible Gazelle Incident, Thomas looked a bit askance when I named the gazelle. He seemed to get more and more nervous about that photo over time. Now he can't even handle having the book open to that page, he just keeps pointing nervously to the gazelle over and over.

His fear has developed further, though. Not only is he worried about the gazelle picture, he is now fearful of the photos of deer and raindeer in the book too. My mom got him a raindeer in a rocking chair toy for Christmas. He is terrified when it starts to rock and doesn't like to see it, period. It's in the entryway hanging out with the gazelle now.

My dad's family got Thomas a set of hand puppets and a theater. He loves them all -- except the giraffe! He's frightened of the giraffe puppet and we had to move the box it was in out of his room. I'm not sure if it looks like a gazelle to him or if he's nervous because of the similarity of sound. In any case, he's not a fan of herbivorous plains dwellers from any biome.

Ready for a dunking

I received my first moleskine for Christmas. It wasn't marked a gift so I opened it already, oops. I'd try to be sorrier if this didn't mean I can use it to take my research notes home with me.



My last research notebook was pretty but didn't stand up to the kind of hard usage I'm known for: every kind of bag, taking notes while pumping milk, a weekend under the car seat before it gets refound, reviewing the contents in the bathtub... I think this one will. I've wanted one ever since I saw Nathan's, but didn't dream they were reasonable until Michelle's post.

Just to prove I'm ready for the other sort of dunking she mentions, I also took a photo of the tea area Matt recently set up for me. (Look how lost his poor little coffee pot looks!) Wish it was this clean now!

Toddler fears

Thomas is starting to be afraid of things. It's interesting to see the logic and survival advantage of some of his fears -- and the random insanity of others.

A while back I worried on here about how to get him not to touch the radiators. He put his hand on one accidentally a couple days after they came on, just for a second. He wasn't burned, but he was frightened. Now, about twenty times a day, he points at the radiator in whatever room he's in and says, "AAAA!", looking at us. We say, "Yes, that's hot. It's a radiator. We shouldn't touch it," and he confirms this: "AAA!" Very seriously. Like he wants to make sure we know to watch out for that thing. It's scary, mama. Don't touch it. Occasionally he wobbles unsteadily from room to room, pointing out each of the radiators in turn: "AAAA!" Good survival fear, right?

On the other hand, about two weeks ago he was starting to get pretty dry overnight in his room and the cheapo humidifier I bought last winter wasn't cutting it. Matt did a ton of research and bought him a nice one online. Warm mist, automatic something, humid-de-whatsit, and a lot of other nice buzzwords. It really is great. (I want one for our room now.) But the first time we set it up we set the humidity setting wrong somehow and instead of shutting off when it got to 40 percent humidity or whatever we thought we'd set it at, it just kept going. It humidified at an alarming rate! In fact the warm mist condensed on the ceiling and ran across it, where it dripped all over the room.

Naturally, sleeping in a tropical rain forest (recall that it was also 85 degrees) came as a surprise to Thomas. He woke up and one of us retrieved him to go back to sleep in our bed. This is a normal occurrence so we didn't think much of it. We put him back to bed after he fell asleep and he woke up again. It wasn't till I went into his room to sleep on the floor (he likes this) that I realized I was being rained on. Then I noticed that Thomas's bed, being under the runoff zone for the aforementioned ceiling-river, was very wet. At that point we adjourned to the adult bedroom for the rest of the night.

Now, ever since that night Thomas has been ambivalent about sleeping in his crib. He'd rather sleep on the mattress on the floor of his room (if he can't have our bed, that is). We're thinking about taking the crib out for good and letting him have his bed on the floor for a trial and see how it goes. But that wasn't the point of this post, was it? No.

The point of the post was the next day, when I tried to put Thomas down for a nap, he suddenly started screaming. I couldn't figure out what was wrong and I pulled out all my normal mama tricks to reassure him, but it just wasn't working. Suddenly I realized he wasn't just screaming, he was screaming at something, something in his crib. It was a stuffed gazelle, part of the mobile that hangs over his bed. I picked it up. He wailed and pointed at it. I offered it to him, gently (this is how we've been handling new fears -- occasionally he just takes the thing and stops being afraid of it). He pulled his hand away. I had to take it away and hide it. Then put him back to sleep. I told Matt I thought it had fallen into his bed when the water was dripping all over him. Maybe it hit him, or maybe he blames it for his bad night. Totemic magic or something.

Ever since then, whenever he sees the gazelle he freaks out. But he's also obsessed with it. I can't just take it away, because he follows me and tries to find it. He wants to keep it in sight. Even the week we spent in San Diego didn't make him forget: Friday I accidentally left it somewhere he could see it, and when I tried to hide it in our closet he climbed on the bed and kept pointing at the closet and shrieking. Finally I had to take it out while he was watching, carry it to the front door, call him over, open both doors to the outside, and heave it into the front yard, locking the doors firmly behind it. Then I told Thomas it had gone away, and let him look out the window to (not) see it.

I brought it back in when he wasn't looking and took it to the basement to wash and store it. It accidentally got brought back up and Thomas found it again yesterday. We had to give it the same treatment. Beware the stuffed gazelle!

Self-indulgence or self-care?

Well, Thomas's heart looks good, but not quite as good as last time. His cardiologist is being cautious and didn't take any medicines away. Luckily Thomas really likes his medicines.

As anyone who's been a Ph.D. student or a mom, not to mention both, will know, I've been a little frazzled lately. Between the job market, the dissertation, the toddler, and the inevitable householdish tasks (which I hate, can I stop living in our world now and go live in one where things Just Work? where you don't have to call the insurance companies to find out why they both refused a bill they're both responsible for and the landlord's gas doesn't get shut off, so the dryer has heat?), I've been walking the thin line between sanity and... well, we all know what's on the other side of that line.

Friday I had an icky day, nothing major, just no end to the minor frustrations, together with the continual major frustration of knowing I was within a couple hours of having that draft ready--a couple hours I didn't have! Matt brought me home some dried apricots and chocolate covered almonds. I'm embarrassed to record here for posterity how many there were, but I will admit I finished them all by Monday.

Today was another yucky day. I was a little disappointed in the cardiology result (he's doing so well, clinically speaking). Worse, Thomas was terrified when they put the electrodes on him to do his EKG today. He's always loved cardiology appointments in the past -- they are a children's hospital, so there are lots of kids and everybody makes a huge fuss over him. But now he is a toddler and suddenly scared of things. The electrodes scared him so then he didn't want anybody to touch him the rest of the day. Except me, thankfully. His cardiologist is great -- knows this age and his personality and was very gentle and talked to him respectfully -- and once everybody else left he did reluctantly let her examine him and even smiled at her. And she is not worried about the echo results so I won't worry either -- at least this is what I keep telling everyone and myself. I miss Amy.

So tonight, between pushing myself so hard lately and this unfortunate day and no caffeine all day -- I was too busy to make tea this morning and had neither cash nor time to get anything at the hospital -- I was drained by the time Matt got home. He sent me to bed. ("Go lie down!" is something you can usually only get away with saying to your dog.) I made myself a cup of chai with milk and more sugar than I usually put in a whole pot, and lay down to reread one of my theological fantasy books.

That got me started thinking -- what is the line between self-care and self-indulgence? Does it only start to be self-indulgent if you aren't grateful?

I'm grateful. And I'm also grateful for this time right now, which I'm using to upload three whole months (yikes!) worth of pictures, mostly of Thomas, to our gallery. Since there were so many, there are updates in a bunch of different albums -- it's like a scavenger hunt! Enjoy.

Oh, I forgot to mention my brush with fame in one of my favorite blogs. What extraordinary talent or quality of learning does my newfound (and no doubt shortlived) notoriety rest on, you ask? Why, knowledge of outdated internet memes, of course!

I live to serve the internet.

i think i did it...

First three chapters. To advisor. That's a hundred and [mumbles] some pages.

Hopefully I can do my mid-course review now!

I was so proud of myself I let myself play two hours of the Sims 2 Pets. I was so messed up in the head by the end of that that I decided to make a couple roommates who fall in love the first day who are all dressed up to match their dogs. The guy has whiskers on his face, like Halloween makeup. They're going to be dog breeders. What a weird family.

Now I'm really, really tired. But I did it! Maybe tomorrow I'll try to reflect on where I am now. But now, too brain dead. Sleep. Good night.

Oh! I take Thomas to the cardiologist tomorrow. Prayers for reduction of medicines are rising like incense...

Unnapping

Thomas took an anti-nap last night. He woke up about 12:15. I nursed him back to sleep and he woke up as soon as I set him down. I cuddled him back to sleep and he woke up as soon as Matt put him down. Matt rocked him back to sleep. Et cetera.

He ended up staying up 3.5 hours, having his diaper changed, getting an extra snack, going to the bathroom, playing with his toys, and just generally causing mayhem and having a grand time. Matt stayed up with him and I went to bed, and eventually fell asleep again, which is good because I have an observation this morning.

I'm so hoping this won't become a habit.

With the beautiful people

I have a job interview (!) at this year's AAR so I had to go get a suit. There's a seven-floor (!) Macy's one block from Thomas's daycare so I went after I dropped him off. I can't believe how many kinds of clothes one can buy, if one is so inclined. I wasn't. But I did get a nice outfit for my interview. And although it took several hours, it seemed less tedious than shopping usually does. I guess I must be excited about this job opportunity! Plus where the beautiful people shop (Water Tower Place), all the salespeople are always there to answer all your questions, tell you the jacket's too big and whisk in 60 seconds later with the three next smaller sizes. It's partly flattering and partly unnerving.

Where the beautiful people shop? They have a wide selection of 32DD bras. Wow.

Now back to the dissertation.