Instructions: use the word “wreck” in a sentence.

Fritz: Uncle Bill went to a wreck last year.

FYI: Uncle Bill went to Afghanistan, not Iraq.

We’ve been looking on-line at used vans. There are several at eBay we’ve been considering. They usually have a reserve price (an undisclosed amount that the seller will not sell for less) and a “Buy It Now” price if you’d rather just close the deal right now at their suggested price.

There is one van for $11,900 Buy It Now. The vehicle is a 2003 model, but it’s going for pretty cheap because it has a few dents. And this is fine with me, because the other vans are all 2005 models and like new, but cost $20,000. So, I see huge savings in getting this particular van and don’t really care about the dents.

So, the sale ends today. Last night we bid $10,160 on it. If you don’t know, eBay will put you at highest bidder with the lowest price possible and automatically raise your bid for you to your maximum. We became highest bidder at $8500 but the reserve had not been met. Today, we were outbid by a bid of $10,200 which still did not meet the reserve. So what’s the reserve? $11,800? hello? what’s the point of even offering anything for bid?

It is my fervent desire that my husband makes it home from work at a reasonable hour tonight. Yesterday, when it was past time for him to be home and he hadn’t called to say he was on the way yet, I called and reminded him that I really wanted to go for a run. Before midnight. He called an hour later and insisted that I get ready to go out the minute he came in the door. And he, wonderful man, didn’t even complain that he had to hold the baby for the whole half hour and therefore didn’t get to eat his dinner until 8 pm. This is the sort of support and encouragement that I require of him, but he usually forgets to provide. Of course, since he spends 12 hours in the office most days, I suppose I should be more understanding if his brain is a little fried and he has trouble remembering my long list of demands including being home for dinner and providing an opportunity for me to exercise.

I’ve been watching my friend’s children for a few hours on thursdays to give her a break since her husband is deployed. She watched my kids on Tuesday for that FRG meeting and is insisting that she could do that every week. The baby is high-maintenance, but I’d keep him. The rest of the kids are pretty easy to please and require very little adult-directed entertainment. In other words, the older 4 kids know how to go play, as long as they have each other, and generally only need an adult around to provide food and drink and occasionally arbitrate. And if they are in an environment with toys they are not accustomed to, they could disappear for hours and maybe only pop up looking for the bathroom.

But I hate to ask her to watch the kids. I’m supposed to be helping HER. I know my kids aren’t much trouble, but that’s not the point. And, I KNOW, having been there, what’s going on. It is VERY difficult for strong, independent women to accept help. On the one hand, having me watch her kids for a few hours provides her with a much needed break. I am sure that over the next few months, there will be times that those few hours are all she has to help her keep her sanity. But on the other hand, she can’t help but feel that all those hours of help are adding up and that she OWES me so much.

This is, of course, not the case. It rarely is. Most of the time, people offer aid out of the goodness of their heart. A woman makes a meal for a friend or neighbor who is sick or has had a baby and does not expect a meal in return once health is restored. A neighbor who watches your kids for an hour while you take a feverish baby to the doctor is not looking at her calendar while you’re gone and planning a time when you can watch her kids.

And I think most of us can accept the occasional assistance like that. The problem comes when there is a long-term situation that has one person “on the take” frequently and rarely able to reciprocate: for example, a serious illness. A woman who is herself sick or who is caring for a child, spouse or parent who is very sick probably isn’t going to be able to help anyone else for quite some time, but may need the help of the community in the form of meals, child care or whatever someone could offer for months. Accepting help for months is a difficult thing to do. We want to be strong and having your church bring you meals twice a week for three months is not what a strong women does.

But, yes, it is. A truly strong woman can be humble. A truly strong woman knows she CAN do it all, and DOES do it all, but she knows that sometimes her prayers to God for strength are answered, not just with the spiritual stamina that she knows she needs, but also with a very tangible, very real strength in numbers as others help her.

I had much practice at the virtue of humility when Bill was deployed. I had to suck it up and ask for help many, many times. And sometimes the answer was no, and I had to ask someone else. It was horrible. I distinctly remember when I was very pregnant and the gutters on my roof were clogged with oak leaves. We were having heavy rains and the water wasn’t able to drain away from the house so it was getting into the basement. I really didn’t think it was prudent for me to climb up and clear the gutters myself: not only did my swollen belly keep me off balance, I had three little kids to keep an eye on too. I called four or five people before I found someone willing to come out and clean my gutters for me. Isn’t that ridiculous? Who wouldn’t help a pregnant woman with a deployed husband clean out her gutters? Can you imagine saying no?

Looking back, I don’t even remember what the excuses were. I don’t even remember who told me no. I just know that I had to ask for help for a basic need not once, but repeatedly. I guess God felt I needed to prostrate myself and beg, which is very humiliating and exactly how I felt. But I’m stronger because of it.

And so, back to my husband who can’t get home at a good hour and my friend who wants to watch my kids. It would be nice to take an hour once a week to go for a run. I wouldn’t be so mad at my husband for coming home late all the time if I knew that on tuesdays at least I could exercise. And I suppose that my friend’s situation isn’t the same as someone with a serious illness. She is capable of watching my kids, they would offer her a distraction, and she wouldn’t feel the burden of “owing” me something.

And perhaps, this is God’s way, again, of keeping me humble. I could be proud of myself for helping out someone in need and getting nothing out of it. Or I could let her reciprocate and thereby negate that accumulated balance of her “owing” me.

Yesterday, Billy discovered that all the answers to his math worksheet are in the teacher’s manual. He could not understand why I wouldn’t just let him copy them down. Why in the world should he tax his little grey cells when all the answers were over there? It wasn’t deviousness, it was pure 6 year old logic: you want the answers, there they are, let me copy them. He failed to see the value in having me make him calculate what was left if you took 2 bananas away from a monkey who had 7.

He is too much like me.

From Catholic Exchange and Eric Scheske:

The absurd, Camus said, is the state of existence that is every man’s lot
because nothing corresponds to his highest yearnings. In order to understand what Camus is saying, consider how ridiculous it would be if there was no such thing as food, but we had an appetite for it. At some point someone would become aware of the odd juxtaposition of appetite and no food, and say, “What’s going on here? Why do we have an appetite if there is no such thing as food to satisfy it?” That’s the same thing Camus said about man’s desires and dreams. Every man hopes, but there is nothing to satisfy his hopes. Man naturally harbors desires, but there is nothing to respond to them. That, Camus said, is absurd.

And for an agnostic/atheist, he’s right. We’re full of yearnings, of desires for something higher, of hope for eternity. But what do we get in return? Disappointment, pain, and death.

Things are philosophically tough for an atheist.

Of course, from a religious standpoint, things are not at all absurd:

Moreover, those yearnings are there for a reason: they correspond to reality. The mere fact that we yearn for permanency — for eternity — points to
the fact that permanency exists. And because we know nothing material lasts forever, the permanency must be spiritual.

Now, having lived an absurd life for many years, I know it is very easy to know the solution and not so easy to live the solution. It is very easy to know that faith, hope and charity are the key to happiness, but it is not so easy to have faith and hope. And even more difficult to have charity, even if one does have faith and hope.

But, to deny oneself the pure joy that comes with having faith and hope and exercising charity is…absurd.

Yesterday I had 4 things on my to-do list:

#1: Call the piano technician about the problem we’re suddenly having with the piano. I’ve realized that getting a piano based on its looks is as foolish as buying a car based on its looks. I called the technician, but he is recovering from surgery and refered me to another techinician (the one he subcontracted for the original repairs) who hasn’t called back yet.

#2: Schoolwork – my #1 priority, as it always is. I was set up for success, had everything ready to go, but then the phone rang…

#3: Grocery store: we were down to our last half gallon of milk and were running low on Ovaltine, too!

#4: Take the kids to a valentine’s party. I have an awesome friend whose husband is deployed. Her friend’s husband was working until 10 pm last night, so they decided to have a valentine’s party for their kids and the kids of 3 other friends and let the parents have a few hours to themselves. So, not only would they watch my kids, they’d buy the pizza too. How cool is that?

A simple enough day, but then the phone rang.

It was Bill. Did I remember how last month he mentioned an FRG meeting (Family Readiness Group…”ready” for your-husband-to-deploy-and-leave-you-a-single-mom-for-a-year group) and how he was supposed to get some info for me (like the day and time) so I could arrange to go? Yeah, that meeting is today. Leave in an hour even though the 3 littlest kids were still in PJs…and school is my top priority…and I don’t have a babysitter.

So, I started to scramble for a babysitter, thinking I’d have to take all 5 kids with me and then the phone rings and it’s the wife of a co-worker who is also going. There is only one parking space available for us to share, so we’re coordinating a meeting place so we can leave one car and go together. But then she mentions bringing another woman, the wife of my husband’s boss. I begin to panic, since I haven’t found any friends home who can watch my kids, and my mini-van is completely FULL when I have all the kids. Not only do both these women have husbands who out-rank my husband, but they’re a bit more polished than me on a regular basis. Perhaps they wore T-shirts with baby spit-up on them when they had babies, but they no longer had babies and I was having trouble visualizing one of them sitting on the floor in the cramped space between the seat and the door of the mini-van.

I finally got in touch with the woman hosting the valentine party and begged her to watch the kids. Thank goodness the kids like her, they are fairly well behaved, and she has a house full of toys. She had them for three hours. I felt bad.

And this meeting wasn’t much of anything. The main reason my presence had been originally requested was to discuss a hoo-ah Christmas stocking I had made for my husband (and about 80 Marines a few years ago). But the powers-that-be who wanted to use my design as a fundraiser for other projects and a morale booster for troops overseas were not at this meeting, so I REALLY DIDN’T NEED TO GO AT ALL.

Since I had found someone to watch the kids, I had already forgiven Bill for the last minute notice. And he had no way of knowing that these other people wouldn’t be attending that day, so I couldn’t get angry at him over that. Plus I had that party to look forward to, so my spirits managed to remain high despite my inability to really get anything accomplished thus far.

Back home we did some school work, but not as much as I wished we’d done. It wasn’t long before Bill was home and it was time to take the kids to the party. Bill and I debated what to do about dinner, and decided on take out. Then we debated where. But when we got there, he reminded me that we’d been wanting to try those burgers from Five Guys (supposedly the BEST burgers in the area). So that’s what we had for dinner on Valentine’s Day: delicious, but greasy, burgers and fries. We went home, put the sleeping baby (car seat and all) upstairs and sat on the living room floor (like old times…but it was mainly because the dining room table was still littered with schoolwork) and ate.

When we were done eating, Bill looked at the clock and we had about an hour until we needed to get the kids. We spent 5 minutes debating how to spend that time, while Bill laughed at how old we were (10 years ago, there would not have been any debate). Then Bill put his head in my lap and we started reminiscing about the last 15 years: when we met, how long it took us to fall in love, how we decided to get married, and even remembering how miserable we were for a few excruciating weeks in 2004 when he got back from Kosovo and we thought we could never be happy again (but then, within a few days, the storm cloud completely dissipated and it’s been all sun every since). We engaged in this verbal foreplay for 5 or 10 minutes before Pete woke up, deciding for us how the rest of that hour would be spent. Ah, the joys of motherhood.

All in all, a good day. Completely unpredicted and unplanned, but that tends to be the normal course around here. And now, today, the ONLY thing on my to-do list: SCHOOL. I don’t want this school year to linger past the end of May. We’re likely moving this summer and I need to be done with this year before that chaos begins.

Pete has been taking long naps recently (1 or 2 or 3 hours long!). And he’s been doing this 2 or 3 times a day. And I can just put him down in his crib without much fuss.

The first day he did this, I thought he was dead.

Then second day, I thought he must be getting sick.

The third day, I thought it must be a growth spurt.

The fourth day, I began to take it for granted.

The fifth day, yesterday, I began to pat myself on the back for being such an amazing mom.

haha

Actually, I’ve done nothing different in my parenting the last week than I have in the previous months. I think we’ve just hit a milestone and he’s starting to get into a more predictable and regular phase. At least I hope so. Bill still thinks growth spurt, but I wouldn’t think it would go past 3 days or so (based on previous experience). We’ll see. For now, I’ll just rejoice and try to use my new found time wisely.

I’m personally opposed to the death penalty, but if someone else wants to do it, I don’t feel I should intervene.

I’ve never seen the point to a hunger strike. The one on strike suffers and tries to prove a point to people who really just don’t care. And then, if it goes on long enough, you just get so weak that they put you in a hospital and force-feed you with an IV. So, you basically inflict torture upon yourself. I just don’t get it.

I don’t follow the news much. Just the headlines, not the details.

Yeah, yeah. I know. Bad bad bad. I’m going to hell. To not stay abreast of the latest scandal rocking Hollywood or the same old same old he-said-she-said of international politics is immoral, criminal, and downright stupid.

Whatever.

So, I knew about the Danish cartoon and the rioting. Bill and I do discuss current events, when we have a quiet moment, so we talked about it to some degree. But now I have a greater understanding of the TRUE motives. Kind of like discovering that Hitler targeted Jews not because they were Jewish (oh, please excuse me if that is a big shock to you), but because they were wealthy, middle class, and a threat to an unholy dictatorship.

Indeed, with Denmark set to assume the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council, the flames of the cartoon controversy have been fanned by Iran and Syria. This is critical since the International Atomic Energy Agency is expected to refer Iran to the Security Council and demand sanctions. At the same time, Syria is under scrutiny for its actions in Lebanon. Both Iran and Syria cynically want to embarrass the Danes to achieve their dangerous goals.

So, it’s not really about the cartoon, it’s about embarrassing Denmark. I get it. Thanks to Eric Scheske for the link.

Woke up yesterday morning to 6″ of snow and no power.

The snow was gorgeous. It had first fallen heavy and wet and so clung to every bare tree branch transforming stark black skeletons into bleached beauties.

Of course, these overladen branches were likely the cause of the power outage. The price of beauty.

After Bill cleared my car and shoveled the drive, I went out foraging for coffee and to see if the post chapels were preparing for Mass. The roads were fine, relatively. Plows had been plowing and the heavy snow compacted nicely. My ABS works fine, I discovered. You need to check these things every so often. But two of the post chapels had no power and the third had a pristine blanket of snow over the parking lot, which led me to believe that Mass was not happening that morning.

One Dunkin Donuts on post was without power, but the other was closed. Heaven help me, I nearly cursed. It’s one thing to cancel Mass, and quite another to close a place of business. Especially one that serves coffee by the box.

So, I went off post and the roads were fine there too. I passed a McDonalds, but it looked closed. On second glance, there were two people inside, but I had already passed it. The nearby 7 -Eleven was open, so I got coffee but they were out of donuts.

The kids were happy to learn when I got back that Mass was canceled and they could go play. Bill and I kicked around a couple of ideas about what to do about Mass. We thought about doing a prayer service, but decided on going to the 5 PM drunkard’s mass at a church off-post.

We were still without power by late morning. One of my neighbors, a southerner by birth, remarked that if the power didn’t come on “soon” the pipes might freeze.

I managed to supress the urge to laugh.

I assured him that all he had to do was turn the taps open a tiny bit and all would be fine.

By noon, the temperature in my house was about 66 degrees. That’s about 4 or 5 degrees less than I prefer to keep it. But it’s also about where I used to keep it when money was tight. It was noticeably cooler, but not even very uncomfortable. Oh yes, that’s why we invented things like sweaters.

The power kicked on at 1230 PM. It was nice to be able to make a hot cup of tea.

We left for Mass around 430 PM. Not only were the roads clear, they were DRY too.

The schools are closed today. They’re closed in New Jersey too, but NJ got 18 inches or so. I’ll have to do school really early this morning before the neighborhood kids knock on the door.