Heaven Help Me!

Can anyone out there  recommend a good megaphone? After about 5pm, my late thirty-something prego body is kaput, and the kids are totally taking advantage of this! It is much more effective for them to know that if there’s any goof-ball action, I’m going to get up, chase them, and catch them. But since there’s about five more months until I’m able to do that again without them totally laughing at me, I think I’ll have to settle for a megaphone.

(p.s. back in our days on the farm, I used to swing around 50 pound bales of hay and 45 pounds of grain until my due date! yikes! I was 25 then.  ;) )

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It was a highly tactile day in our house!

This “Make Your Own Snowman” kit allows you to build snowmen and igloos indoors,      when it’s too cold to play outside!

Four differently shaped (snowballs, snow cubes, snowman powder, snow base) polymers soaked overnight in H2O give the appearance and feel of

REAL ICE & SNOW! (Except not as cold.)

Would you believe it’s reusable? We’re going to dehydrate it, then “just add water” to use it again. (I’ll report back on how that worked out later.)

I’m hoping one of the kids will get psyched up to build a big snowman tomorrow, so I can post more pictures of it… I think today we were all just mesmerized by the texture of the stuff!

(p.s. It’s totally non-toxic and safe)

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Some years ago, my husband was inspired by G.K. Chesterton’s metaphysical thriller The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, to adopt a new code of  names amongst our family members to settle our nightly chaos resulting from the ritual question “what should we do together as a family tonight?”. While our former system used to end in several children in tears or frustrated that no one ever wanted to do what they do, the new system solved the problem by assigning each person a “night” of the week (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, etc. depending on the childrens’ birth order), in which the assigned child gets to pick the family activity which everyone participates in. The most popular choices are watching movies or playing video games, however, occasionally we do something different like we did tonight for “Tuesday’s” (Clare’s) night: Blue Light Chemiluminescence experiments.

A cheap kit purchased at our local American Science & Surplus shop (in addition, a good site to visit for some comic relief) provided hours of entertainment tonight. A little more advanced than our ordinary kitchen science (like Gianna’s adding vinegar to the juice remaining after boiling a head of red cabbage, producing a color chemical change: purple to blue), this kit used “real” chemistry to produce its results.

Do you know what you get by mixing Luminol, Perborate (Clorox 2) and Copper Sulfate? Lights off for a cool blue glow! This isn’t me – but this is what chemiluminescence looks like. The kids enjoyed the experiments and are glad they now know where “glow sticks” come from.

Hopefully, there’ll be more experiments to come!

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Did you know that two phone books can adhere together as if cement were applied to each page?

This is what my children learned from Mythbusters’ September 10, 2008 episode, “Phone Book Friction”.  If you interweave the pages of two phone books,  they are impossible to pull apart, except with well, a tank, maybe!

They kids tried it out yesterday. At dinner, they tediously weaved each page on top of the next, the next on top of that, etc. until they replicated the original shown on Mythbusters.

The result:  they pulled and they tugged; they fell on the floor from trying so hard to get it apart. The phone books would not release themselves from each other!

Here’s a couple pictures of them in action!

Eventually, they did get the two sides of the phone book apart – but it was because the covers ripped off – NOT because the pages slipped apart!

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One may be surprised to know that it is a fairly recent practice in Catholic homes to celebrate birthdays. In our culture, birthdays seem integral to the celebration of a person’s years on earth; but let us not forget the Catholic custom of celebrating “Name Days”!

Today is the name day of one of my children, Teresa. We are remembering her patron saint, St. Teresa of Avila.  At the age of seven, St. Teresa of Avila wanted nothing more than to give her life for Christ. So, she ran away to Africa to attempt martyrdom amidst the Moors.  Some may say it is fortunate that her uncle retrieved her from this, or we wouldn’t have the volumes of writings St. Teresa gave us.

This morning the children woke up to the smell of incense wafting through the air, the icon of St. Teresa of Avila prominently displayed at the kitchen table, fresh cannolis and hand-dipped chocolate covered strawberries from the local Italian market.

We celebrate Name Days “in style” in our family, perhaps more so than birthdays. Lest this tradition be misunderstood, I found an excellent article on the practice of celebrating name days.

What this article says in a nutshell is that while it is not necessary to ignore or do away with customary birthday celebrations,  we should try to restore the meaningful celebration of the feast of the saint whose name was given to us in Baptism, “our personal patron, loving and helping us whether we observe or neglect his veneration”. As a parent, I have found that my children typically do not object to this practice – any chance to get treats! They also like it because it is unique to them. Every one in the family has a birthday every year, but the child celebrating his/her name days enjoys a day which is exclusive only to him.

And the best part about it is the celebration of Name Days doesn’t end with childhood. It continues for older children, adolescents, and adults for the rest of their lives. As timeless is the life of faith, is as eternal the celebration of our union with God. And this is truly something to celebrate.

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As I was reading the Chicago Tribune this evening, I came across this article, entitled “Card games are great for families”. I remember growing up enjoying board games and playing “Rummy” with my family. We had an Atari 2600, and an Apple II Plus, but the thrill of playing a non electronic game with the family kept drawing us back to treasure that activity. In today’s world, however, it seems card games have a lot to compete with. Video games which provide constant stimulation and positive reinforcement every ten seconds are the entertainment of choice. I bemoan the fact that electronic video games are such a favorite activity amongst my children, but I am also responsible for that fact. After all, as one who spent hours every weekend on my Atari, how can I preach to them about how these games, while fun, are essentially a potentially dangerously solitary activity? The new social media does successfully draw people together, but the old-fashioned worried mother part of me thinks it is not as beneficial as the skills learned from an old fashioned card or board game. As the author of the article in the Tribune writes, “Card playing around a table is “massively social, intimate and direct,” McNeely says. “It covers all ages, interests and attention spans.”
Within my immediate family (now), we realized early on the importance of such intense and intimate social interaction. Having a child with Asperger’s Syndrome made it apparent to me early on, that board games and old fashioned card games run different for non-neurotypical children. In other words, for those who brain is wired differently and see the world not as others do, board/card games work on important pieces of the “social puzzle”. In fact, these games were recommended to me by my child’s therapists in second grade as a tool for teaching social skills. Everyone needs to learn important skills for civilized social exchange such turn-taking, following the rules (not cheating), and frustration tolerance. The flip-side of this, is that while these games are good for promoting civil behavior, playing them with this goal in mind makes them much more “work” for everyone involved. We do them occasionally, peppered with plenty of video games and movies in between. My children find the video games much more relaxing, and more so than I did when growing up. (This comes as no surprise to me now, as I’ve discovered many of my childhood favorites – spam, the great outdoors, having pets – are unappealing, and sometimes inconvenient to them as well). Perhaps the real problem is that I think children today have way too much ability to create their ideal environment – one which is convenient and comfortable, with frequent positive reinforcement – and my concern is that I’m not sure this produces the endurance and perseverance necessary to bear future hardships. Card games and board games could be one way to help in this area.

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