Reflections on a Year Ago

Certain times of year bring back certain memories for me. For example, for many years after our semester in Austria in college, autumn leaves and cooler weather always brought back memories of the Kartuase and the emotional adventure that Europe was for me.

This time of year, late May, planting the gardens, working in the yard bring back my memories of being huge. I was enormously pregnant with a 10 lb baby boy last Memorial Day weekend. I did not know that the baby was a boy or that he was so big, but I was anticipating and waiting on his arrival.

This year is quite different. I have known that I am the mother of a boy for a year now. I have experienced his uniqueness for a year. And I have had so many things I wanted to say about this until I sat down to write and the children became restless.

The girls and I were perusing the blog of last May and the baby and I were pretty huge there together in that last bump shot. Oh, what a difference a year makes.

I am not sure if my experience of mothering T has been different because he is a boy or because he is number 4 or because I am older or because he took on the bad sleep pattern of his eldest sister. But I think that my fears last May of being tried beyond what I had been tried before with a baby were warranted. I felt throughout that pregnancy that this fourth baby was going to be a challenge for me. I wrote last May:

"My motherhood and wifehood is not about being blissful and comfortable day to day, it is about giving myself as a gift to others, so that one day I can have the ultimate human end of eternal happiness with my Creator and Savior. And it is hard. It will never stop being hard, but it is the gift I am called to give.

Our earthly vocation will not always make us happy now, but if we persevere in it, we will be happy forever. It is the same in any vocation, to priesthood, religious life, consecrated single life, and marriage; we will not always be happy."

And since T was born that has been a reoccurring theme for me. And the truth of it is that I have been happy in my day to day life, despite the sleepless nights, despite the stress of home schooling, despite it all, I have grown. I often feel guilty that I am too happy. I wonder what I have done to deserve the blessings that I have. And the truth of it also is that we do have our daily frustrations, faults, shortness of temper, and the occasional major argument; but we always come back to the happy state of the life we have. I will probably write more on this as the first birthday gets closer, but that is all the time I have for now.

Princesses In Fairy Tales

By H J Ford, L Speed - The Red Fairy Book, 1890., 10th impression 1907 Lang, Andrew, 1844-1912; Ford, H. J. (Henry Justice), 1860-1941; Speed, Lancelot, 1860-1931, ill. London : Longmans, Green, and Co. Copy held by Uni Toronto. Lib., scan made available at IA.org (online viewer). Convert to PNG, from JPG, and greyscale, with black and white point correction., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10836124

We do formal storytime twice a day: fairy tales at lunch time and the older two listen to a chapter book read by the professor at bedtime while the younger ones get a shorter story individually read by me.

Our lunchtime story has been from Andrew Lang's Fairy books.* Since September we have made our way through the Blue and Yellow fairy books and now we are in the Red fairy book.

As it happens most of the "fairy" stories involve princesses in addition to fairies, and the princesses that are heroines of fairy stories always are endowed with great beauty and the very best of virtues. They are all very good, despite their various upbringings.

Now, don't get me wrong, some of the nobility are evil. They are princes, princesses, kings, or queens and are very bad. It is always clear in the stories that these people are bad. Often a story will have it that the eldest two in a family of three brothers or three sisters will be more selfish or more foolish, and the third will be the most beautiful and most virtuous. And sometimes the oldest two in a family will be just bad.

One thing we have learned about princesses in fairy tales is that if she is married to a prince who is an unhuman creature by day, such as a pig, and a man at night, if she does anything to see him at night, which she most certainly will, then she will be separated from him forever, that is unless she embarks on an impossible quest which requires the aid of the sun and the moon and the west wind and the east wind and the north wind and the south wind to fulfill.

It should also be known that if a princess in a fairy story is told that she can do anything but one specific thing, then she will most certainly do the one thing which is forbidden, and then a consequence will ensue which will involve an impossible quest which requires the aid of the sun and the moon and the west wind and the east wind and the north wind and the south wind or perhaps the aid of a fairy.

Sometimes in the quest of a prince, he will help three animals out of various difficulties and they will come back to help him when he needs help to do whatever task he has to do to gain his freedom or his love. Often these tasks involve bringing a horse out to graze that runs away everyday, and if the prince cannot bring him home the witch or giant will eat him.

And while most princesses have happy endings, it does happen sometimes that the prince and princess will run out of magical resources at the end of the tale and the evil yellow dwarf who wants to marry her will slay both her and the prince with the prince's magic sword which he drops instead of listening to the advice of the dolphin who brought him to the island on which his princess was being help hostage.

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*Andrew Lang's Fairy Books:  
The Blue Fairy Book
The Red Fairy Book
The Green Fairy Book
The Yellow Fairy Book
The Pink Fairy Book
The Grey Fairy Book
The Violet Fairy Book
The Crimson Fairy Book
The Brown Fairy Book
The Orange Fairy Book
The Olive Fairy Book
The Lilac Fairy Book

At the NCRegister Blog: A Eulogy for a Tree

‘They’ve cut it down!’ cried Sam. ‘They’ve cut down the Party Tree!’ He pointed to where the tree had stood under which Bilbo had made his Farewell Speech. It was lying lopped and dead in the field. As if this was the last straw Sam burst into tears. (J.R.R. Tolkien, Return of the King)

It began in the morning. I was instructing my daughter in adding multiples of ten to two digit numbers. The younger children were running in and out of our kitchen nook where we were working. The nook gives a full view of our backyard and the neighbors’ trees towering above their privacy fence.  And then I saw the cherry picker going towards the 50-year-old maple tree in our next door neighbor’s backyard. They had trimmed it back severely last autumn. It was a beautiful old maple tree, providing cool shade and beautiful yellow leaves in the fall. The tree trimmer began to take all of the budding branches off one of the big branches. I could not stand the tension. I closed the blinds, and made another cup of coffee. There was no way that I could teach my daughter and watch the destruction of the tree.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/sspencer/a-eulogy-for-a-tree/#ixzz49hCR4CfM