Children, Sacramental Grace, and Hair Clogs

Oh gosh. Another really busy week. 

More good stuff than bad though. 

Though, for some reason, Blogger won't let me upload any images to this post. (Except this flower one, as i discovered a full day after i wrote the rest of the post). 

1.) Confirmed

'Tis the season for sacraments, and I got tapped to be my teen brother's Confirmation sponsor, as I mentioned in last week's takes. 

I did NOT go into labor before or during the big day. I did, however, get a blessing the night before from our pastor, who specifically asked God not to let me go into labor for the next 48 hours. And I got to go to confession, which I always like to do before having a baby. 

The Confirmation mass in the Cathedral went well. Our bishop may re-use an anecdote or two, but he actually gives different homilies instead of the same canned one at every mass. As someone who's had a fair amount of teenagers in my life and has been to a couple of these, I really appreciated this, and as someone who's done a little public speaking, I'm pretty stinkin' impressed. 

We ended up parking in the space right next to our pastor, and got back to the car after the mass just as he was pulling out to leave. He saw me, rolled down the window, and shouted, "You didn't go into labor!! I wasn't sure you'd be here!!" 

"Yeah Father, the blessing worked!" 

2.) Kindergarten Graduation

Little Boy still has a day or two of school left, but they held a graduation ceremony for the kinder classes on Wednesday. 

It was actually pretty well done: short and sweet, but not overly sickly sweet, only one song performance (which was frankly adorable), with lots of support and enthusiastic cheering from parents, and with a principal and staff who obviously had a good rapport with one another as well as enthusiasm for their jobs and the students. 

Little Boy did well, and was very happy to have us, his little sister, and both sets of grandparents (both fully vaccinated, for the record) there cheering him on. And it was lovely to see community again. I've really missed that. In a year where we weren't able to go to any football games, pep rallies, or parish festivals, it was surprising just how meaningful a few families gathered in an elementary school cafeteria could be.  

3.) Reasons to live in South Texas

 To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure about how I feel about the Benedict Option. Initially it seemed like a paranoid reaction to the world at large, reminiscent of some of the less healthy uber Catholic homeschooling groups I was around as a kid (the type that banned Disney movies because Simba kicks up some dust and it spells "sex" in the Lion King if you pause it at exactly the right moment).

Then I realized that part of the reason that it seemed like such an overreaction to me was because i live in a pretty unusual area. South Texas is primarily Tejano Latino, and it's still very very much culturally Catholic. Blue collar Catholic: you won't find many "Theology on Tap" groups or book clubs dedicated to Tolkien and Chesterton. But you will see things like a little shrine to our Lady of Guadalupe in a local restaurant, a holy water station in a mechanic shop, or a  picture of St. Martin of Tours behind almost any cash register in a family owned business. And many, not all but many, of the parishes here are vibrant and active and have full masses with families and children in attendance (and there's several of them). Our bishop is pretty pastoral too, which I'm realizing more and more is a bit of a rarity. 

So if you're one of those people I've been seeing online talking about moving to a more Catholic friendly area, I recommend South Texas. The Latino culture takes a little getting used to if you weren't raised here (anglos are the minority in many neighborhoods) but it's beautiful and vibrant and a wonderful place to raise children. It's one of the few places that an ethnically Catholic culture still exists. 

4.) Controversial Two Cents 

I've been more on social media lately, which means I've actually noticed the latest "controversy" among Catholic social media. 

Yet another reason to get rid of my Facebook account....

I hadn't heard about Fr. James Altman until a week or so ago, but my goodness...the man apparently has some feathers a wee bit ruffled.

My two cents? I've seen too many clergy or religious leaders people claimed were walking paragons of holiness, including some with large public followings, turn out to be absolute snakes in the grass to support any as universal "proclaimers of truth". If you want to ask me my opinion about a particular saying, sermon, action or discussion we can talk about it, but I will NOT, I repeat, NOT join or back a cult of personality or defend anyone as a generally "holy person." Period. Not until the person has been dead for several years and is being canonized. The movement around Fr. Altman seems to be one of general personality, "he's a holy man!", rather than defense of a certain thing he said or did. For that reason...I'm not touching anything about it with a 10 foot pole. I could go on, but I've written more about my approach to this sort of thing here.

5.) Circle of Life

I think that what we found on the kitchen floor the other morning is proof positive that we have a bug problem- a cluster of fire ants consuming a dead roach. At the point that you've got an ecosystem forming on your kitchen floor, you might want to start taking more drastic steps. This is what happens when you have a huge influx of rain out here...the fire ants start coming into the house a few days before, seeking higher ground. And the roaches are just kind of always here. We try to be clean, but there's really not a ton you can do in a humid climate like ours beyond setting out poison or bug bombing the place. So we share living space with creepy crawlies. At least they haven't gotten into the pantry-- and we haven't had any mice since this winter.

6.) Drain on dude, drain on.

Among this week's adventures (which included some pretty heavy duty nesting on my part in the form of running all over town grocery shopping and running logistical errands with a three year old in tow and dealing with an Old Testament scale plague of mosquitoes thanks to the rain last week), our shower drain decided that now would be a good time to commit fully to the partial clogging it's been sporting recently and just dive headfirst into total uselessness. 

So, after the kids were put in bed, Chris tried plunging it. 

It brought up a whole bunch of black, nasty smelling gunk, but the water stayed put. 

He tried poking an untwisted wire coat hanger through the tiny holes in the immovable, built-into-our-ultra-cheap- shower's drain grate thing. 

Nada. 

He left the house for about an hour. When he returned, he had a plastic drain cleaner thingie (a long thin plastic thing with a handle to twist it and what looked like the rough side of velcro on the end), a package of some sort of enzyme stick meant to keep the drain clear, and two very, VERY large cans of michelada (tomato and clam juice mixed with beer and sometimes spices). 

The drain cleaner thingie was only able to get tiny chunks of the hair clog out, and eventually became bent out of shape. 

So THAT was a bust. Though the stagnant, stinky water did finally start to slowly drain. 

At this point, it was getting to the point of ridiculous. Chris did a phone search and found a recommendation to mix equal parts baking soda and salt, stuff as much as possible down the drain, and then chase it with a pot of boiling water. He figured, "well, it's worth a shot", and we had plenty of both in the house. 

That finally worked. I'm not sure how or why it worked: why that particular combination would be able to break up and wash down a, quote, "brillo pad of hair", but now we know that it works and we have that tip in our arsenal. 

He also drank both micheladas (it was a long day). 

7.) Laboring 

So. Thursday morning, I wake up at 2am feeling like I'm being kicked in the stomach, go to the bathroom, and notice some blood. We get all excited, get the kids into the car, drop them off at my parents', drive into town to the birth center...and labor stalls after about three hours. I get sent home. 

It's Thursday afternoon as I write this, and I really am not sure WHAT the heck is going on. My body is sending very mixed signals-- I'll have an hour go by with nothing, and then get a contraction so hard I have to yell (though my husband and midwife prefer the term "vocalize") to get through it. And then another half hour or so of total inactivity. 

Either I'm in some sort of super slow labor, or this is just going to be pregnancy for the next week (or the next day or so, then I'll get back to my normal pregnant self with normal braxton hicks contractions). 

On the bright side, the kids and my husband are out of the house for the day, so I get peace and quiet to write and sleep a bit. 

I guess if this makes it up on time to the link share, without any addendums, y'all will know that it was really and truly a false alarm. If I do have a baby sometime in the next 12-24 hours (though that seems a little unlikely), I'll be sure to update this before I post to the linkup. 

Update: Bitty Baby was born at 1:35am. She is lovely, I am tired, lol. Both of us are doing well. 

See the res of this week's takes here.