Friesencold

here is a picture of Cash after getting his hair cut. As you see, it still goes crazy but at least now it’s a lot shorter.

This was Cash yesterday morning, so this morning we went to Great Clips.

Last night the strangest thing happened to me. I have been feeling bad for almost a week now and I thought it was just a cold, but then yesterday I had started to think maybe it’s a sinus infection from how much pressure I was feeling on the right side of my head and how stuffy my right nostril had continued to be. TJ and I had just settled down to watch the first episode of the new season of LOST and I noticed my back was starting to hurt. I thought maybe it was because I was sitting in a different chair than usual, or just that I was turning my head to see the TV. I moved to my usual chair where I sit to read (that never makes me hurt!) and I even turned the chair to face the TV so I wouldn’t have to turn my head, but the pain just continued to get worse and worse.

Then around 9:45, I started feeling this awful ache in the left side of my body. It is hard to describe how it felt, but along with the achiness I also started shaking, sort of like a chill came over me and I couldn’t warm myself up. Fifteen minutes later, just as LOST was ending, I was in complete tears, feeling like there is something majorly wrong with me and why can’t I relax? What is going on that is making my back and left side hurt so much? Why can’t I stop shaking? My whole body felt tense and miserable and I was truly thinking I might end up in the hospital if things didn’t improve. I had no idea how I was ever going to get to sleep, and I knew that sleep was one of my greatest needs at this point as I had been up since 3 am due to not being able to sleep the night before from all the congestion in my head. I even wondered if this whole episode was my body’s reaction to not getting enough rest this last week, even though I’ve tried! I never knew that breathing through my nose had so much to do with me sleeping, but it obviously does.

Well, I decided I should try to make it to the bed and see if that would ease any of the pain, so TJ helped me get up off the couch and begin moving. I was like a zombie, walking with my eyes closed. I felt like this must be how a person with a migraine just goes into a dark room to just be in there until things pass and they can get on with life. Once I got situated on the bed on my right side (the non-hurting side), TJ got warm covers for me. Then I asked TJ to just put his arm around me and put pressure against my body. That was the only thing that helped at all, just having the pressure to keep me from shaking as badly.

I was just laying there, all stuffy, crying, shaking, aching, not knowing what is going on, what is taking over my body. And then TJ started praying for me. When he was done and we were silent for a few minutes, TJ began saying that this could be our enemy the devil’s attempt to stop the good things God has been doing in my life. I truly have been blessed again and again lately with things I feel like God is allowing me to see about life, and the real reality, through the book I am reading called Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr. That would be a whole other story to tell, and I will in time. But the main thing that’s happening to me is that I’m getting free! I am letting go! I am becoming less and more all at the same time! TJ began praying again, this time against what the devil would possibly be up to in my life. He spoke the name of Jesus which is always the most powerful name to speak. As TJ prayed this second prayer, I felt the strangest most peaceful calm come over my body. The pain in my back subsided and the shaking stopped. Stopped! I was able to lay there calmly and begin to rest. I also began to see firsthand that what is, is the great teacher (that’s from Rohr’s book).

Once God answered like that, I felt such a desire to praise him. So I prayed for a bit, and after that, TJ and I began to talk. We just lay there on the bed, talking, and it was as if time had stopped. It didn’t matter to me at that point if it was 10:30 or midnight. All that mattered was that TJ was there for me and I was going to be okay.

TJ was there for me. He was really truly there. And that counted for so much. As I lay there thinking, I imagined me in the place of TJ, and Bauer in the place of me. I imagined myself thinking about all the things I’d rather be doing than just being here with Bauer. I imagined how I would feel like I was being hindered from accomplishing tasks. Then I thought of myself and TJ in the current situation, and how it so strongly felt like what TJ was doing by being there with me, just resting with me and staying with me, was something huge. It counted so much and I don’t know how to say it differently than that. I feel like I was able to see how Bauer’s needing me to be with him, in times of sickness or sadness or childness (which would just mean daily), is a need that counts just as much as any task I could do. It is huge and thank God, some scales finally came off my eyes to let me see that.

God taught me so much through that hour and a half long experience last night. There’s a line in Rohr’s book that says, Have you been loved well by someone? I know last night that I was loved well by TJ. I let him love me and it felt good to be so needy that that is all you can do, just let yourself be loved. I do not have much experience with this in life because I have lived with the belief that as long as I feel good about myself, it doesn’t matter what others think of me, whether they like me or not (and like could just as easily be called love in this sense). Well, I am beginning to see that it does matter about others because letting them love me is a very good start to letting God love me.

Did you notice the second meaning in that question about being loved well? It’s as if God love for me and TJ’s love for me are what made me well last night. Well in body and a lot more well in soul and spirit than I’ve been in a long time.

This evening I am doing a lot better. I got some Afrin nasal spray and my, oh, my – how did I not know about this stuff sooner! I recently mentioned to TJ that I was thinking maybe I should take a week off from working out, but little did I know that was practically going to happen by default. Only this afternoon did I start thinking how nice it sounded to go outside and take the boys for a walk in the stroller. I told Bauer we could walk over to the train station after Cash’s nap, but I didn’t know Cash was going to sleep till 4:45 – a solid 3 hours! We ended up not being able to go, but I think I might be up for a walk tomorrow morning.

While Cash was sleeping, Bauer and I did some things in the kitchen. First I cut up veggies to go in our chili tonight while Bauer pretended to cook his playdough pancakes in a pot on the stove. Then we washed grapes. Bauer did a good deal of the separating of the grapes from the stems and all of the hands-in-the-water washing.

Yes, I resorted to the "don't smile" technique and it worked!

While Bauer was busy with the grapes, I decided to make the chocolate pudding recipe my friend Hannah shared with me a while back. It’s not your typical pudding – it’s made with avocados! – but I really thought it would be good since I used similar ingredients for the eggless chocolate cupcakes I made for the boys’ birthday party last fall. If nothing else, I figured I could tell Bauer it was yogurt and that is a kid that loves yogurt. I have had to explain to him recently why we don’t buy yogurt. He knows some of his friends get yogurt and he often asks for yogurt if he sees it at the store. My explanation was something to the effect that some people use cow’s milk and some people don’t. I did promise him, though, that we’d look into yogurt made from soy, almond, rice or coconut milk at Whole Foods. So many options!

So, back to my pudding…It was just 3 ingredients: 2 avocados, 1 cup dates, and 1/2 cup cocoa powder. Put everything in the food processor and let it do the work!

My food processor is usually the bomb, but on this I just couldn’t seem to get the pudding smooth enough. I’m not sure if it was because the dates I used were a little on the hard side or what. I kept blending and blending but finally decided enough was enough. Bauer wanted a taste (and then another) and I kept asking him if it was chewy. He seemed to like it, but we’ll see if that’s still the case tomorrow when he can actually taste things (I don’t know why I didn’t think of the fact that neither of us would even know if we liked it with our stuffy noses, but oh well….) When TJ got home tonight, Bauer was excited to show him our creation, which he kept calling “chocolate stuffing.” I guess that’s a little more accurate with our noses anyway.

Legos are the all the rage around our house lately. Or as TJ would say, Lego. I always called them Legos – did anyone else?

Bauer has also been pretty excited lately about putting on his Kenny Chesney outfit: jeans, button-up shirt, cowboy boots, and cowboy hat. No pictures of that, but here’s Cash trying on the garb.

TJ has gone skiing today to Devil’s Head in Wisconsin with his buddy John, so it’s just been me and the boys around here. I had planned for us to get back to church today (we have missed a lot this month due to various sicknesses), but yet again we couldn’t go. Cash was running a fever of 103.8 last night and was just not himself at all yesterday. He is a lot better today but I still didn’t want to put him in the Toddler room at church. I am not feeling well myself, in fact (go figure, with all the sickness I’ve been around). It’s a head cold and it’s gettin’ old. I feel like if I could go outside and breathe in some of that fresh cold air, it would really feel nice about now.

We ran out of facial tissues unfortunately so we really needed to make a trip out this morning. The roll of toilet paper just wasn’t cutting it for all the blowing we were having to do around here. So I took the boys out for a couple small errands and we bought 12 boxes of Puffs at Target (we are not fans of the Kleenex brand, which is why I said facial tissues above), along with some Dove Dark Chocolates, sponges for the dish scrubber wand thingy, 12 oz blackberries on sale for $2.99, and a few avocados for a buck a piece.  Isn’t it fun to know what’s in someone else’s shopping cart, besides 2 little boys?

This book I’m reading, Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr, is really turning my world upside down. These lines just earned 5 little stars in the margin on page 90:

“Life does not care what I like or don’t like. It doesn’t matter a bit. If we stay in the world of preference and choice, we keep ourselves as the reference point. As if it matters what color I like.”

Whoa, what am I supposed to do with that? There again is the focus on “I.”

I am really grateful to a God who lets me be a part of this mystery. He let me be born and as Rohr says earlier in the book, “God is maintaining us in existence with every breath we take. As we take another it means that God is choosing us now and now and now. We have nothing to attain or even learn.”

I think I am starting to see what life is asking of me, and that is to die. Die to everything I have ever known or exalted about myself. Death first, then life can come. Losing myself to find myself. And this isn’t pie-in-the-sky “feeling” stuff. This is lived out in the daily-ness of it all. This is me giving Bauer my attention when he calls for me to look at something – I can choose to really look or to pretend to look. This is me getting up to pick up Cash’s fork off the floor again when I’d rather TJ or Bauer get up and do it. This is me letting go and oh, how it might hurt to do so. But it is the hurting that will bring the healing.

Two more quotes from Rohr:

“What can’t happen if we live entirely within the small “I” is, quite simply, love. Love is almost not possible there….When we live out of ego, we impose our demands on reality. But when we live in God’s presence, we await reality’s demands on us.”

“The private self is clearly an illusion largely created by thinking. My life is not about me. I am about life!…Don’t take this private thing so seriously. The primary philosophical and spiritual problem in the West is the lie of individualism. Individualism makes church almost impossible. It makes community almost impossible. It makes compassion almost impossible.”

Wow – There is just so much here, now. And I am here, now. And God is here, now. And all of that is just about the most amazing thing ever.

That, and this: How did Richard Rohr come to see all of this, and not just to see it, but to write it in a way that I can feel it more deeply than I have felt most any other thing in life? The answer only makes God even more real and true.

Dear God, please make the itching end soon.

Lots of TV (which he loves), lots of oatmeal baths (which he likes), and lots of the pink stuff (which he hates).

In better news, Cash got his stitches removed today. How come he didn’t even flinch when they took the stitches out, yet he fights me like crazy every time I try to brush his teeth?

I am engrossed in the book The Kite Runner which my friend Julie recommended. It is breaking my heart. I just want to read more so there can be some redemption. At least I hope that happens because any good story has redemptive value. If nothing else, I am already finding more compassion and emotion inside myself than before starting to read this book, so that’s redemption enough at this point.

I am also very much in the grips of Richard Rohr’s thoughts in Everything Belongs. I really cannot write about it just yet. There is much more sinking in to be done first.

And last is the book I’m reading called The Magic of Chia. Sounds kind of like The Coconut Oil Miracle, doesn’t it? I am learning more and more about chia seed and look forward to adding it to our diet. I hope to post about chia sometime in the future, once I can get my thoughts together on it.

Does anyone mind that all I write about lately is the kids’ ailments and the books that are helping me survive?

He’s not as happy as he looks. Today has been an itchy day. But I am glad this is going to count for us, as far as Bauer not ever having to get chicken pox again.

Cash, however, is as happy as he looks.

When he gets his paws on the Dustbuster, you can just leave him be for a while.

Just be prepared for some tears when you finally take it away.

TJ took Bauer skating for the first time this past week.

He did okay pushing the bins around on the ice, and then he was done!

I’m done, too! Wish I wasn’t but it’s time for me to go fix dinner.

The fun never ends.

It was another trip to the ER for us this past Monday. Cash got a hold of a pair of scissors (from a desk drawer that is child-proofed, mind you) and before we could intervene, it was Bauer to the rescue. Unfortunately the rescue didn’t turn out quite as intended. As the scissors were being pulled away from Cash, his finger got sliced open and required 4 stitches.

Thankfully it was on TJ’s day off so I didn’t have to brave the ER alone, and the whole trip, from home to ER and back, took less than an hour. It’s always nice when the mishaps of life work out conveniently.

Bauer’s chicken pox are coming at a rather convenient time now too. It’s been 2 weeks since he was exposed to Cash having them, so this is about what one would expect. He started with just a few spots yesterday on his belly and chest and now there are more on his front and back. I am interested to see if Bauer’s case will be as mild as Cash’s, or with Cash’s being as mild as it was, if he will get it again from Bauer. There will be an updated pox post once there is more to report.

At the beginning of January, TJ and I implemented what we are calling “Arts Hour.” It takes place from 9-10 pm several evenings a week. The evenings vary, but it probably averages three evenings a week. The idea is to stop whatever else we are doing and participate in the arts, whether it is reading, writing, listening to music, playing music (this would be TJ and his guitar), or even watching some or all of a movie. What Arts Hour cannot include is the TV (movies are okay) or the computer. So if I want to write, I can write on paper to type onto the blog later, or I can write a letter to someone, which is something I really enjoy. So far this month, all I have done is read during Arts Hour. TJ has been reading some too. He isn’t quite as into Arts Hour yet as I am, but he is still taking time at least a couple nights a week to sit and read or sit and sit. Nothing wrong with just sitting.

What is this life if full of care / We have no time to stand and stare? -W.H. Davies

TJ is currently reading Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. The three books I’m reading are listed on the Books page of the blog. I really like reading books of different genres all at once. I like having a health or nutrition-related book to read because it keeps me motivated to prepare healthy meals and I just find the material very interesting. I like reading a good work of fiction because a good story is a great escape. And I like reading a non-fiction book by a favorite author such as Anne Lamott, Madeleine L’Engle, Kathleen Norris, Frederich Buechner, or Henri Nouwen because it makes me want to be a better me. It pushes me toward God in a way only words can.

We have our small group on Monday nights and I have decided to use one other evening each week to make plans with a friend for coffee or the like. It’s been good knowing I have the option to plan to meet a different friend each week, but also knowing there is a boundary set so I don’t end up making too many plans. It seems my friend outings have been on Thursday nights so far. TJ doesn’t get home from work until at least 8:30 on Saturday nights, so we don’t do Arts Hour on Saturdays. That means Arts Hour is usually scheduled for Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Friday would make a good night to watch a movie for Arts Hour, although we haven’t done that yet. Last Friday night, we went out on a date to dinner and the bookstore. We had a $25 gift certificate to a new restaurant in downtown Naperville, The Black Finn, so we got to eat for free, and then we sat in Barnes and Noble and read our books for a while. I guess we had Arts Hour after all, although I am just now thinking of that.

I like how setting aside the time to read seems to make time go slower. Even if I have a bunch of other things I could do to fill an hour’s time, stopping to read or listen to music or both while drinking hot tea and having a few Fudge Babies is about the most strategic thing I can think of in the way of slowing down my life and being intentional with its direction.

On the days when Bauer can’t fall asleep during naptime (like today), he has Quiet Reading Time instead. He will sit back there on our bed for a good hour or more and flip through book after book to his little heart’s content. When he runs out of books, he will get up and pick himself another big stack of books from the shelf and go back to his reading. He usually wants a snack (or two), but as long as he’s quiet, I’m happy because I like to do my own reading/writing during this time.

Bauer is really enjoying the Patricia Lakin books about the alligators named Sam, Pam, Will and Jill. We have read Camping Day, Snow Day, Beach Day, and Rainy Day, all from the library of course. They are all very cute and clever rhyming stories. Bauer picked up the phrase P-U (as in, something stinks) from Camping Day and now uses it in all sorts of contexts.

We also checked out every Ezra Jack Keats book that was available the last time we went to the library. I knew of Ezra Jack Keats from the one little board book we have called The Snowy Day about the little black boy named Peter. I didn’t realize Keats had created all these different stories with Peter and his friends who live in the same neighborhood. I love the words Keats uses as he writes the stories. I’m no expert, but I think his books are truly great children’s literature because of the way the stories and pictures draw us in and keep us wanting more. One of my favorites is Jennie’s Hat, while Bauer is partial to Regards to the Man in the Moon.