Somerset Maugham said, “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”

I heard this quote on the Writer’s Almanac today and it struck me that this is at least part of the reason I hope that my children will be readers. It is still a struggle to get T to sit on my lap long enough to make it through an entire book, but I am happy that he shows an interest and always asks for a book before bed, even if it is partly to delay bedtime. Sam and Maggie and I are now reading A Horse and His Boy, one of the Chronicles of Narnia, and I am thoroughly enjoying it.
Reading this series again reminds me of the first time I read through them with Amy, Joel, and Patrick. I think they were ages 8, 6, and 4 at the time. I would turn off the light in the bedroom and read with a flashlight, partly because the children seemed to listen better that way, and partly because I couldn’t see the messy room while I was reading and feel that I should be tidying it instead of reading. It worked pretty well. We made it through the entire series. At the end of The Last Battle, the final book in the series, there is a scene where all the characters from the series are brought back together for a heavenly reunion. It is a beautifully written piece and moved me to tears. When I closed the cover and turned on the lights in the bedroom, the children saw that I had tears in my eyes. Patrick sprang out of bed to comfort me. “It’s ok, mama”, he said, “We can start the books all over again tomorrow.”

A couple months ago, as the days began to grow cold and shorter, T discovered the moon. Perhaps it began with Goodnight Moon and was reinforced in the many other children’s’ books that end with a child in bed and the moon in the night sky. One day, when there was a bright full moon, I pointed it out to him when helping him out of the van. He looked up, but I didn’t think it made much of an impression on him. Once we got inside, he looked at me and said, “moo, moo”. Confused, I looked for his barn and toy cows, but he walked over to the front door and pointed at the window, repeating “moo, moo”. I got it. I picked him up and carried him back out to gaze at the moon a little longer. Lately, T has been asking to look at the moon several times each day. I can’t believe how little I took notice of it before. We now see it in different places and phases and at different times of day and night. Recently, Mike called from the grocery store with a message, “Get T out to look at the moon right away. It’s really bright right now!”
One of the many joys of being around children is that we get to rediscover many things that we have grown to take for granted over the years as grown up thoughts crowd our brains. Mary Oliver’s question at the end of her poem, The Sun, grabs me and calms me every time I read it:
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
as you stand there,
empty-handed-
or have you too
turned from this world-
or have you too
gone crazy
for power
for things?

Maggie made these cupcakes that were just too good not to share.  She just made chocolate cupcakes from a box and took them out two minutes early to set a  marshmallow on top of each one and return them to the oven.  She baked them for one more minute, and then put them until the broiler until the were golden brown and toasty.  She garnished them with a raspberry. Delicious.  

There was no school last Friday, and I decided the time had come tackle Sam’s room.  I always get a little emotional going through the dresser and packing up clothes that are clearly too little.  It’s especially hard for me when they are old favorites, like his Super Mario Brothers shirt that was worn as soon as it came out of the laundry all last year, or the old Insect Fear Film Festival T-shirts from his annual visits to this campus event with our friend Bob.  I wish there was some way to keep just a scrap for sentimental value. I’ve seen wonderful quilts made out of special old t-shirts, but I know better than to hang on to them with the crazy notion that I would ever actually do something like that.  I quickly dropped the precious shirts in a paper grocery bag and reminded myself not to be silly.

When I pulled the middle dresser drawer open, I saw this velvet box, opened to show the contents.  There was a wooden dragon’s head, part of a broken incense burner purchased by Amy at Stronghold Castle’s Medieval Fair.  There were several shiny rocks from a rock collection passed on to us from a graduate student at our old church before he moved away.  There was also a Styrofoam ball, painted to look like an eyeball.  I guess that this came from a Halloween party, but I don’t know when or where.  The box itself was passed down to Maggie from one of her favorite grade school teachers, who retired after Maggie’s fifth grade year.  I stared at the display for a second, admiring it.  The collection was a little work of art, hidden back there in the dresser drawer.

The box reminded me of that song from the movie The Littlest Angel, starring Johnny Whittaker.  Does anyone else remember this?  I had the record as a kid and I loved a song called “I have saved”, which lists the contents of the littlest angel’s special box, which he somehow manages to bring to heaven with him.  After an unsuccessful search for the lyrics, I found the contents in Bing Crosby’s song: Just a butterfly with golden wings/A little piece of hollow log/Two shiny stones from a river bank/And the worn out strap from his faithful dog.

Children are natural collectors, usually considering more than the resale value of an item and the space it occupies when deciding whether or not to hang on to it.  I once had a huge collection of party napkins in such a box.  I remember my  mom and grandma  saving napkins from special events to bring home to me.  Of course, I left the box intact.  In fact, I quit cleaning altogether, took a picture, sat down to look for the song lyrics, and ended up writing this post. Maybe I’ll get back to it later.  Maybe I won’t.  I don’t know why I always think of clutter as such a bad thing.

Recently, we added occupational therapy to the mix of early intervention services (therapy for children from birth to age three) in T’s IFSP (Individual Family Service Plan).  Because T often had difficulty calming himself in order to focus on speech therapy activities, a team decision was made to have an OT  (occupational therapist)“co-treat” with the speech therapist.  This means that each week, during T’s hour of speech therapy, he also has an OT working with him on strategies to help him to get the most out of the session.

The results have been very encouraging.  T lies on his stomach on a large exercise ball and completes entire puzzles while rolling back and forth.  In this position, he is able to find pieces requested by the speech therapist, name them, and put them in their proper places.  Before, puzzles were rarely completed before he began throwing the pieces.  When he has reached his limit for concentration during therapy and declares that he is “ah da!” (all done), we have found that giving him some time out to jump up and down or roll on the couch while being pressed with a pillow provides the sensory input he needs to return to the tasks at hand feeling calm and refreshed.

We have also learned that T  really likes pressure.  Weight or pressure on his body gives him the input he is looking for when he hits, throws or spins around.    He has a weighted lap pad that he likes to put in his lap while he is busy with his “work”.  Often, when the pad begins to slip off of his lap he will reach down to put it back in place, a good indication that he likes the way the way it feels.  Other times, his OT will apply pressure with her hands to his arms, head, and back while he is interacting with the speech therapist.  We are all amazed at the increased length of his attention span and the improvement in his language skills that are apparent when this co-treatment is happening.

Since I have been participating in OT sessions with T, I have noticed that the application of deep pressure has a similar effect on me. Bear hugs have always felt good to me, and I now know that this is because they provide the good kind of pressure in addition to expressing affection.  Last week, I went to the dentist with a nasty toothache.  Dentist visits are rarely calming, but when the hygienist removed the lead apron after taking an x-ray, I realized that the weight of the apron had given me some relief.  I wanted to ask her if she could put it back on.  My favorite application of this principle came to me a few weeks ago when I redeemed a gift card for a hot stone massage at Bella Vita in Champaign.  Deep pressure?  Yes.  Stress relieving?    Absolutely.  Maybe we can make a team decision to add regular visits to my individual service plan.

The past few days I have hardly left the house.  These are my favorite kind of days.  It’s cold and windy outside and I make hot chocolate and hot dinner for the kids as they come home.  I fold the laundry while it is still hot out of the drier and wipe down the countertops with hot soapy water.  You can’t tell it by inspecting my house, but I love housework.  Or rather, I love to work in the house when it is quiet and calm and I have a great audiobook on my ipod.   Once I make peace with the fact that I will never finish it or get ahead, I find that there is a fine line between work and play. Today I discovered that T likes housework, too.  He took the spray bottle and squirted it by himself on the front of the dishwasher.  He then took a wet rag and wiped it, saying, “wash, wash” as he worked.  I hadn’t noticed how dirty that surface was and he stayed with the cleaning job for several minutes.  He then moved on to the refrigerator.  This time, he took a marker and scribbled on it first, then sprayed and wiped it again.  At first, I tried to stop him, but as I watched I realized that the surface wipes perfectly clean, like a giant dry erase board.  Why not?

In the middle of my seventh grade year, when I dreamed incessantly of being a new person who had nothing in common with the shy, chubby girl I was, I had to stay after school to make up a test.  As I sat by myself in Mrs. Fuller’s room, concentrating on my paper, I felt a firm hand on my shoulder  and heard Mrs. Fuller’s quiet voice in my ear.  “You are a nice person,” she whispered.  “Every day, you listen in class.  You hand in your work on time and you write well.”  I think that was all she said.  It wasn’t a lot.  She didn’t tell me that I would someday do something great.  She didn’t tell me that I was the best student in the class or that she had never seen such work from a seventh grader.  But I will never forget the feeling of elation that spread through my whole body as a sat there.  Even today, as I write about the experience, I feel a lump in my throat.  Did I look up into her face and thank her for the kind words?  I don’t remember.  It’s more likely that I just mumbled and walked away.   But I remember that wanted to skip down the hall to my locker as I left the building.  I felt transformed.

I am the parent of a seventh grader this year.  Many days when I drop her off, I breathe a sigh of relief that I do not have to walk through those doors.  I have yet to meet anyone who looks back on junior high school as “the good old days”.  I am thankful for those teachers who are willing put themselves back in that setting, believing that they can make a difference in our children’s lives at a time when patience and affirmation is most needed.

I am sitting in our suite at the Drury Inn in St. Louis waiting for T to go to sleep.  I have had to go into his room two times since I tucked him in.  The first time, he was sitting under the TV watching the news.  The second time, the phone was beeping because he had taken it off the hook.   An entire box of Kleenex was emptied and strewn about the room.   I put him back in bed and put on my most serious voice.  “Stay in bed now.  STAY in bed.”  I quickly turned my back and left so he wouldn’t see me smile.  Several years ago, his behavior would have made me cry.  But I’m forty-four and I’ve been through this before.  Besides, bedtime defiance is typical behavior for a two-year-old.   Tiny T was a bit late in starting to walk and talk, but he is right on schedule in exerting his independence at bedtime.  What a great kid.  What a happy night.

On Tuesday, we dropped our oldest daughter off at college.  I had joked to friends that it felt a bit like we were just playing a game since her dorm is about a mile and half from our house.  I felt nothing but joyful anticipation for her as I watched her walk away from us into her dorm.  I have no doubt that she’s going to love college.  It wasn’t until I made a quick trip to the grocery store later that afternoon that it hit me.  Yoplait was on sale and I was looking over the selection to stock up on her favorite flavors when I stopped myself and got a little misty eyed.  When I got home, I dug up a poem I remembered reading years ago so that I could have a good cry. The emotion is not sadness at all. It’s more a great sense of love and thankfulness.  I am proud of her. She has learned to ride quite well without me loping along beside her.  And I’m thankful that she has such exciting places to go.

To A Daughter Leaving Home

By Linda Patson

When I taught you

at eight to ride

a bicycle, loping along

beside you

as you wobbled away

on two round wheels,

my own mouth rounding

in surprise when you pulled

ahead down the curbed

path of the park,

I kept waiting

for the thud

of your crash as I

sprinted to catch up,

while you grew

smaller, more breakable

with distance,

pumping, pumping

for your life, screaming

with laughter,

the hair flapping behind you like a

handkerchief waving

goodbye.

We had a class assignment to choose a family symbol to write about.  Here’s what I chose:

Several years ago, while my husband and I were sitting in Fazzoli’s with our five children, I realized that I was at ease and enjoying the meal in a way that I usually did not at home.  It was one of those rare and magical occasions when there was conversation instead of bickering and most exchanges were actual words, rather than high-pitched squeals and gestures.  Certainly the fact that I was not cooking and serving the meal was helpful; Eating out is one passion that Mike and I share.  But there was another important factor.  Instead of our long, wooden, rectangular table that had in our home, where Mike was at one end and I at the other, we were seated around a seven-foot round table, which was laminated like a counter top.  There was no table cloth that could be pulled off by the baby, and spills could be easily wiped up without damaging the wood, but most importantly, we could all see each other’s faces.  I became fixated on having such a restaurant-style round table in our home.  After getting several strange looks in restaurants around town when I asked where I could obtain a table “just like this one”, we found a place online that would sell us just one such table, rather than sets of six.  Although I would still prefer to eat out any day, that table vastly improved our meal times together.  In fact, the table symbolizes many of the things that we value most as a family.

The table is representative of our big family practicality that values function before fashion.  We can appreciate beautiful decor in other people’s homes, but if something doesn’t serve an obvious purpose, we don’t have the space for it in ours.  We make space in our family room for a piano, a cello, and several electric guitars on stands, along with  amps, and the miles of cords that accompany them, but we couldn’t find room for a Victorian sofa or antique wash stand, as much I like them.  We have no colorful planters or valuable pottery on the coffee table.

The practicality principal applies to more than just furniture.  We don’t worry too much about matching gloves or even socks, for that matter, as long as the hands and feet are warm.  We have never paid for a car repair that was purely cosmetic.  If the car runs, that’s all we need it to do.

The table also reminds us that, while we often fall short of our goals to have long conversations about important things around the dinner table, we have not given up on our dreams of family interaction completely. There are plenty of nights when the Shea kids feed on bowls of cereal while standing up at the kitchen counter before running back to school for drama or soccer or orchestra, but several times each week, we sit at the round table.  Some nights, we just inhale Little Caesar’s pizza together; Other nights, there is so much noise that I have had to implement the “magic scoop”, which requires that a child must be holding the ice cream scoop it before speaking to ensure turn taking in the conversation.  Sometimes it feels like a Herculean effort just to get through dinner, but the centrality of the table in our home reflects our belief in the importance of meals together, and every now and then, we are blessed with a conversation that goes beneath the surface and helps us all to understand and appreciate each other in new ways.

Perhaps the best thing about the round table is how easily it lends itself to adding an extra person.  Adding an extra seat requires everyone to move a little closer together to make space.  We added an extra person to our family over the summer.  When T arrived in our home as our first foster care placement, he was three weeks old and not yet ready to join us at mealtimes, but now that he is eight months old, we have made room for his high chair at the table, and he is able to observe and even participate in the craziness of dinner.  The decision to do foster care was one that we made as a family and each child has played a special part in T’s life. At times, I worry about the pain that we will all feel when he has to leave us, but it helps to know that we all moved closer together to make room for him.  And that closeness will help us to deal with whatever the future brings.