We are all very smart

It's the incomparable Jackie! And me, too.

A dapper trio

Loving the patterned frocks!

More lovelies

These two just got engaged after years of dating!

After our brunch, the SBA had arranged for a band to come and lead us on a second line through the Quarter.  We were all official, with a police escort, and we were the toast of all of the picture-taking tourists.  They huddled under awnings out of the rain and took pictures of us as we partied down the street, carrying drinks and umbrellas and our commemorative hankies, soaked to the skin and giddy with mimosa-infused joy.

Getting ready to second line, before the rain began

Mugging under the umbrella - even pouring rain couldn't dampen the mood

I thought I was taking a video of us walking past, and it would have been awesome. But it turns out I didn't push "Record" hard enough, and actually didn't take the vid. SOB.

The band, unshrinking in the rain, led us to Jackson Square, where we danced and danced as the rain dried up and the skies turned blue blue blue.  The end is the beginning is the end.  What a glorious day.

Breaking it down in Jackson Square. Yes, it's ok to be jealous of those of us lucky enough to live in New Orleans.

I am flinging my hankie with vigor, I'll have you know.

This was when I finally sighed with relief. It's over. Joy.

Alice in Wonderland took Judah to Wonderland!  How very meta.

And You Know has a sneaky husband (nice gifts!) and sneaky son (ha ha!)

Attorney at Large is wallowing in family – those living (the sick and hot) and dead (the Dear Maude project sounds exciting!)

Bright Future takes a bold, and so very important, step.

But I Do Have a Law Degree enjoys a nachos, flowers, swimming, and sons.

Butteflyfish is dealing magnificently with a house full of little fishies!

Cowgirl in the City is preaching to the choir.  Preach on, sister!

Decisions on Margaritas honors her kickass mom.

Geeky Law Mom is sorting out her summer plans.

Lacefields in Love had the Most. Amazing. Party for Liliana’s second birthday!  She’s set the bar high for all of us with kids turning two this summer!

Lag Liv is making me want to take a very long scouring shower.  Also, I itch now.  And I’m afraid to put my feet on the floor.  Also – YUCK.

Legally Certifiable is feeling a little down – let’s hope that hearing goes well!

Magic Cookie had a lovely Mother’s Day hike – and did NOT get eaten by bears, more’s the pity (since that we her Mother’s Day wish!)

Frenchie had a lovely first Mother’s Day, with lots of good food (uncooked by her), shopping, and (the Gold Standard) – an uninterrupted shower!

Mommy Madness wades into the Time Magazine Cover fray.  Well – dips a toe into the fray!

Only Three Years did something we all probably recognize – overdid it too soon!  Take care of yourself, mama!

Rediscovering Me has a baby in a bathtub!

Kate survived 1L!  Three cheers!

Cee is having one of those days, but she’ll always be supermom to us!

AND FINALLY.  In news so exciting it almost deserves its own post (but we’ll have to make do with all caps) . . .  I present to you,

Dinei, esquire, who PASSED THE BAR.  Ten rounds of applause for the fiercest woman I know (virtually, at least)!  Hip hip, hooray!  Hip hip, hooray!

The Boys: Liam, Jack, and Owen

Muddy Owen

Best Friends Forever

The boys loved playing the squeeze game

Owen kept making us come back and squeeze some more

They had a great time running up and down next to the neighbor's car

One of their favorite games was scrunching together in a big hug and then falling over - SPLASH - into a puddle

Owen, who is smiling and saying cheese here, although he doesn't look it. Cheese is serious business.

So this morning was a fairly successful group yard sale – we made over $100 total, and got rid of a number of things.  The rest is going to Goodwill as we speak.  I had to collect and clean the stuff for Goodwill anyway, so pricing it and putting it in the front yard was only a minor extra step.  And spending the morning chatting with our upstairs neighbors and letting the boys run wild in the puddles was pretty fun.

Yesterday we spent the entire day in Mobile, making our final selections for our house.  We  picked granite, backsplash, fireplace tile, and carpet, marking the end of our intense period of Picking Stuff Out.  I am by no means complaining – it was a fun process – but hoo boy, that’s a lotta choices.  In any case, we also took some pictures of “Jack’s new house.”  Jack, as you can imagine, was disappointed when he saw it, but we were thrilled.

All staked out!

See our mature trees in the backyard?

What will soon be the view from our master bed window - minus the porta pot and dumpster.

Backyard Trees. I recognize this is a totally boring picture of some trees, but these are MY TREES. Our trees, I should say. And even though I had nothing to do with their existence or survival, I am proud of them!

Anyway, it’s all over and done, but I’m still waiting to unclench.  I’m still feeling Stress Level: Mega right now, heart racing and head in a tight stress headache, even after a Chelada (Land Shark beer, lime juice and maragarita salt.  MMMMMM.)  It stands to reason: so much is coming at us in the next few weeks/months, and it doesn’t look to settle into a routine until August . .  . at which point I’ll be staring down a billables requirement that is a little daunting given my circumstances.  Still, packing boxes and labeling yard sale items is nowhere near the same level of difficulty as memorizing the names and facts and holdings of 57 cases, which is what I had to do for my closed book exam today.  So listen up, fight or flight response – just simmer down here.  Chill out.  Breathe deep.  r.e.l.a.x.

In order to properly acknowledge the seam in my life that I just leapt over, I’d like to go to the gym and lift for an hour, then swim, then take a very long, very hot, luxuriously uninterrupted shower, get a pedicure, drink a margarita, take a nap, and then browse pictures on pinterest and pick design ideas for the new house – I think that would be my ideal post-law school treat.  Instead, I am watching Babar the Elephant and taking my preschooler to the potty and keeping my toddler from launching himself off the back of the couch and building trains and lego towers and answering approximately six bazillion questions about god knows what.  I mean, it’s not the WORST or anything, but I’d love an afternoon off, like, fully OFF.  Just me.  No friends, no conversations with anyone, no nobody except me myself and I.

Tough cookies, darlin’.  That’s the thing about parenting – it’s kinda relentless.  At least my kids are being sweet and in good moods today.

Speaking of kids *she segues awkwardly * I was just looking through my archives and realizing that I write about Jack way more than Liam.  There are lots of reasons for this, I think, which one day I’ll explore in a very long and tortured navel gazing post that you’ll all probably skim with glazed-over eyes, but in the meantime here’s something I wrote a while ago and never put up, all about my littlest man.  With that, I’ll close.  And possibly head off for a glass of wine. Gotta slow this heart rate somehow!

****

One night last month I had the honor and privilege of holding my youngest boy while he puked into a beach towel during the wee hours.  His pathetic retching woke me in the middle of the night, and that was that as far as sleep was concerned – for the rest of the night he was wide awake next to me on the couch, carrying on perky conversations with the characters on the television and occasionally vomiting quietly into the Least Favorite Towels I had selected to perform the nasty job.  (Thank you, orange-on-black-sunset towel, for taking one for the team.)  Later, in the early morning light, he napped heavily in my arms for three hours, drooling as he slept, arms slack, mouth open, a little snore.  He was heavy and my back was aching and I held him nevertheless, on the couch watching The United States of Tara on Netflix, reveling in this physical connection with my second child who has always been a little more independent than his brother was.  Barely a week later, the little man was felled again, this time by a fever, and once again I held his bulky little body for the better part of a day, smoothing his blond hair from his forehead, relishing the cuddles from my baby boy.

He’s such a stolid and confident little guy.  His verbal skills and brain are so advanced, it’s always been easy to communicate with him.  It is very interesting to have a one year old who is capable of telling you what he’s thinking about, who has the vocabulary to do that.  I love it.  The closer he gets to two, the better he gets – he takes direction more easily, he is funnier, he is developmentally ahead of the game and thus rarely frustrated by any limitations . . . he still has developed virtually no fear, not of anything, but he’s learning to obey some rules that we’ve put in place to keep his body safe.  He is short, but stocky – solid as cement, broad-backed and sure-footed.  He is unstoppable, and always takes the shortest route to get somewhere, even if that means climbing over something he could easily go around.  Nothing much can get in his way.  He calls me “mom” in a very matter of fact way.  He never sits still, preferring to have long conversations with me from across the room.  He’ll eat anything, but feeds half of it to the dog.  Sometimes, because of all of these things, I forget he is a baby.

And then he gets sick, and I remember how little he actually is, how recently he was an infant, how far he has to go before he’s truly a grown-up.  Vocabulary and motor skills aside, he is not yet two.  I will never say I am glad that he gets sick . . . but I was glad of the reminder, and of the physical closeness, which has lingered these many weeks beyond his little bouts of illness.  He checks in with me more.  He likes to lay across my back, if I’m sitting on the couch, and rest his head on mine.  It’s nice.

It was, you will soon gather, not without roadblocks.  We had rented a pavilion at this lovely park in order to avoid bringing children (and, let’s be honest, their parents) to our filthy house full of boxes and devoid of any decorative elements (long since packed).  Also, our house is little, and we invited a fair number of people to this gig.*  The pavilion at the park was right near some awesome playground equipment, a little shallow stream, a few gentle and short (.1 miles) hikes – the perfect place for a bunch of four year olds to run wild.  No activity-planning or craft projects would be required.  We would grill out.  Easy peasy.  I made this awesome cake the night before.

Thomas Cake

Ha ha!  Just kidding.  (That cake was made by a Kansas baker named Christi, go check her out if you’re a cake-o-phile!)  The cake I actually made was this one:

Martha Stewart she ain't, but she can draw pictures on cakes with pretzel sticks and nuts.

On Thursday we started getting a little worried about our party, because this was Saturday’s forecast:

Mostly cloudy. Scattered showers and isolated thunderstorms in the morning, then scattered showers in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation 40 percent.

We could not move the party to the local indoor bouncy place, because (a) Jack has always been terrified of bouncy places, and has only moderately outgrown this terror, and (b) another kid from Jack’s class was having a bouncy place party the next day, and we would totally steal that kid’s thunder.  Also, they were all rapidly being booked by the other parents in our situation.  We couldn’t even delay the party, because yet a third kid in Jack’s class was having HIS birthday party at 2 that same day.  (RIDICULOUS, the amount of Hot Wheels cars I purchased in April.)  We spent Thursday and Friday crossing our fingers.

We woke on Saturday to a slightly overcast but dry morning, the perfect temperature.  Our 10am start time meant we had to decide by 8am whether we’d move it inside or not.  We derived much too much hope from the look of the sky, and the terms “scattered” and “isolated” in the forecast, and sent an email to our guests that the party was on.  We began the twenty minute drive to the park.  Two minutes later, the skies opened up.  We chanted our “isolated, scattered.  isolated, scattered” mantra and kept driving, hoping it would clear up by 11 or so.

After unloading the car in the pouring rain, setting up decorations in the pouring rain, allowing the children to essentially writhe in mud puddles in the pouring rain, protecting the glorious cake from the splash of the pouring rain, watching the genial and safe little stream turn into a roaring raging river in the pouring rain, and receiving a number of texts asking about the pouring rain – we sighed deep sighs, shook our fists at the sky, and told everybody to give us an hour and meet us at our house.

So, the party was at our house.  And it went ok.

The only decorations to survive the deluge were this tablecloth, the banner you see in the back, and a couple of balloons.

My little goodie bags for the kids, filled via the Target Dollar Bin, included these masks. Jack was an elephant for the entire party. Also, this cardboard box/bathtub/pirate ship/school bus was, as is to be expected, the best present ever and much fought-over by the children.

There would be no elephant mask removal for the family portrait. Oh no.

I secretly winced at having adults witness the state of our two threadbare couches, but threw blankets over them and held my head high when the hoodlums/children eventually tore them down.

We waited to open gifts til after the guests left. Is this what you do? I don't know the rules here.

He had a blast.  He truly did.  And we served Cane’s chicken fingers, a delicious green salad and a delicious fruit salad, and beer, so I think the adults enjoyed themselves as well.  I count it a success, though I wish we’d skipped the round-trip drives over the Mississippi and just deemed it an indoor party from the start.  Ah well: you live, you learn.

Jack’s actual birthday was the following Wednesday, and he and I spent it together.  We had Jack’s favorite lunch at “the pizza shop.”

The pizza had spinach on it, which I count as a victory against my nemesis, the Picky Eater Diet.

Played at the park.

"We had to protect my body," he solemnly instructed me when selecting this kind of crazy harness swing.

He also raced around playing with all of the baby toys. The height of fun.

Ate ice cream at the “ice cream shop.”

Love this ice cream parlor, in the old McKenzie's Bakery building.

He got most of it in his mouth, I swear.

And entertained calls from his adoring fans.

Jack chatted to every member of our family that day. His side of the conversation mostly consisted of "yeah. Yes. Yeah."

All in all, I think we celebrated the young man’s fourth birthday just perfectly.

*including some childless friends.  This was our first “Friend Party” – in the past we’ve just thrown parties for ourselves, invited our own friends, and called it a party in Jack’s honor.  This year was a kind of hybrid – Jack’s friends and ours.  And it was a mistake, I’m thinking – you gotta go one way or the other with these things.  The childless people feel sort of foolish, and the adults you don’t know (parents of your kid’s classmates) kind of mess with the “this is an adult party” vibe.  It wasn’t unmitigated disaster, just a little weird.  Lesson learned.

After that, I’ll have a smidge of a breather before my paper is due and then my Carriage of Goods by Sea exam (much less aneurysm inducing, but much, much harder).  Which means after tomorrow I’ll post some pictures of the boy’s birthday party, already over a week ago!  I know you’re dying to see!

Meanwhile, I’d just like you to know that Liam sidled up to me during my afternoon snack of Triscuits and provolone this afternoon, and asked me if he could have one.  (“Is dis for me?”)  I gave him a couple and he shoved them in his mouth, chewed a few times, and then sneezed all over my plate of crackers and cheese.  (And my clothes.  And his clothes.  And the couch . . .)  I wiped him off and fed my snack to the dog.

I just wanted to share my pain.

“Come on, Jack, you’re a big boy, big boys put their own pants on.”  This is a variation on a daily theme – the struggle to get him to dress himself.  In advance of my future single-motherhood (three days per week, while their father is working in his own city), I am trying to get my oldest as self sufficient as possible.  I will do the mornings and the nights alone, three each per week, and lest I fall over dead from exhaustion, the four-year old has got to start pulling his own weight.  We started this dress-yourself endeavor months ago, and – in the preschooler way – some days he just does it without complaint, and some days he emphatically doesn’t.

“I’m not a big boy, Mama.”  He’s crying now.  ”I am your baby.  I wanna be a baby.”  Jack is not above manipulating me, and I’m keen to nip such behavior in the bud – but this morning, this particular morning, his tears are genuine.  He’s just gotten over an illness, he had a big birthday party weekend, his house is full of boxes, all the pictures off the wall.  Everything’s different, everything’s a mess, and it will be months before it’s all put right again.  We’re all going to be fine, but this summer of transition is wearing through all of us.

*****

He turns four tomorrow.  Four years ago, he was still only mine.  We shared that secret, special parental relationship that a pregnant woman is lucky enough to enjoy.  It’s not been so long that I have forgotten that I hate being pregnant – no amount of years can erase the memory of spending eight weeks not being able to breathe or sleep when Liam was still torturing me from within.  But, especially on their birthdays, I remember the sweet part of pregnancy, that time when they belonged to only me.  From the moment they are born, I’ve had to share them with others.  (Been lucky to have so many others around that want to love them!)  But before that, when they existed but didn’t yet breathe air, I was able freely to indulge in calling them mine, all mine.  I didn’t have to share either of them with anyone, didn’t have to teach them anything, didn’t have to do anything but try to eat well and sleep enough and feel them moving around, performing their mysteries in the dark and comfort of their safe maternal home.  There were other people’s hands on my belly, feeling a kick – the odd gift sent by mail, anticipating their birth.  Others loved them before they were born, but I was the only one who got to know them.  I don’t think you need this time to love your baby – we ourselves are thinking of adoption one day, and I wouldn’t love that future daughter any less than I do my birth-sons.  It’s just a lovely gift, a special few moments in time when you don’t have to think about shoving your child from you with two hands, forcing him to go Live and Experience, to learn to live without you, since one day he will have to.

*******

Jack is standing there in his underpants, tears pooling underneath his glasses, slipping down his cheeks, his ever-slimmer and grown-up cheeks.  Four years (minus one day) ago, his whole body nestled comfortably along the length of my forearm.  Now he is all gangly arms and legs.  His shin-bones are long and slender, his tummy no longer a baby pot-belly.  As I did in the hospital, in the dark, all those years ago, I marvel at the glory of this perfect body that I made, out of nothing, out of the air.  I pull him to me, tall and slim and still weeping, in a big hug.  ”You’ll always be my special baby, honey.  Always, always.”

“Now put your pants on.”

I come from a long line of devout people.  My mother was a Catholic who left the faith partly because of its teachings on birth control, my father was raised Methodist.  I grew up in Presbyterian and Methodist churches – we always went to one or the other, depending on which congregation and preacher my parents preferred in whatever new place we’d moved (I was a Navy brat, we moved a lot).  I continued to attend through college – I even taught the 2 year old Sunday school class at the Presbyterian church near my Presby-affiliated college.  But already by then I had become alienated from my faith, and I left the church thereafter for a long time (in a huff, I might add).  The Bible is not a feminist document, nor is it environmentally friendly.  Many Christians selectively quote the Bible to support small-minded opinions, to shore up their feelings of moral superiority. A lot of what I experienced as a young seeker of truth/maturity/adulthood was frighteningly cultish and reactionary, and I began to recognize how these wacky people were manipulating, even preying on, the young and uncertain.  As I embraced socially liberal ideas, nothing felt farther from “right” and “correct” than the church, which talked up Love but was trying to use me as a mouthpiece for Hate.

Kathleen Norris was part of how I found my way back.  Her faith journey (gag) has been similar to mine, and her writing opened up the door to my liberal exploration of Christianity.  I realized that the alliance of the conservative right wing to Christianity creates a false dichotomy.  We all know there are a number of right wing people who’ve never darkened to door on a church or spent a second grappling with a religious text, and yet many of them feel that their party is the party of God and would lecture me on my religious failings.  Anyone who attempts to wade their way past a knee jerk reaction will understand that there is room for God, church, and Christ on both sides of the aisle (there are also plenty of Democratic hypocrites as well).  We both love and want to help the poor, we just have different ideas of how to do that.

I struggle with the Bible as well, but I’ve reached the point in my life where I recognize that as the point.  Difficult stories, like that of Lot shoving his daughters out to be raped, are why the Bible is worth looking at.  It isn’t any kind of instruction manual, a guide on how to do things – modern Christians are far too selective to be able to claim such a thing with a straight face.  (And of course there’s the translation problem, the written-by-humans problem, the selection-of-books problem.)  I don’t read parables to my children as a sort of After School Special, a guide on how to be.  I have a lot of issues with the Bible.  Its patriarchal framework can be very harmful.  Stories like that of the rape of Lot’s daughters, and even the more mild verses like that calling for wives to submit to their husbands, cause real harm to women, around the world, when communities take them at face value and use them as tools to uphold oppressive patriarchal norms.  The construct of dominion over and caretaking of animals implies that we are not one of them, which I think falsely separates us from the food web and downplays how interconnected we are with the environment, at the cellular level.  I understand the power of the text to combat the values that I embrace.  (This is true of all mainstream religions, which are very similar, and similarly susceptible to misuse and manipulation by those in power.)

However, it is in this battle that I find value.  Repeating the Bible stories we like back and forth and trumpeting them as truth because we like them (while ignoring or explaining away the ones we don’t) creates an echo chamber that leads to spiritual shrinkage rather than growth.  I find most Bible studies a little narcissistic and shallow for this reason.  It is much more meaningful for me to be angry and reject that crap as crap – and then try to figure out why the “crap” is in there, and why I react to it in the way I do, how I can value crap.  It is similar to the Zen koan, for me – the study of the paradox is what leads to growth.  It is all part of the beautiful mystery – not just the failure to understand, but the search for understanding.  If it were easy, it would not be worth my time.

I would also argue that religion doesn’t cause war, oppression, destruction.  People do those things.  If religion didn’t exist, there would be some other excuse – though religion will always exist.  It is a reflection of the human mind, and like the human mind is imperfect.  That said, it is clearly something we need, have needed since our prehistoric brains developed the capacity to wonder and fear. Religion is a tool, one that many people use for good and many people use for bad and most people use for a little bit of both.  The failings of religion in the world are ours, as are its triumphs.   Calling all organized religion “bad” reflects thinking that is just as lazy as Christians making similar pronouncements about their own values.  Organized religion is a vital and inevitable part of the human experience, and it can be a tool for bettering oneself and the world, or it can be a tool for self-congratulation and close-mindedness.  There are other tools – politics, drama, education, music, all with followers just as fervent.  There is room in my own fledgling faith pick and discard the tools I like, and to allow others to do the same.  I will never tell the atheist she has no wisdom to offer, or that she will go to hell.  I will never tell the Mormon that what she believes is wrong.  My biggest struggle with my adult exploration of religion has been to understand that I dictate the terms of my private faith, not other people.  My continuing struggle is to extend that courtesy to others, including the evangelicals whose religious practice I reject.

My return to the church has been tentative.  I’ve been ready to flee at a moment’s notice.  Except for our collective prayers in worship service, when people hold hands and pray in public it sets my teeth on edge.  When people say “my relationship with God” or “faith journey” (see above) or announce a “religious testimonial,” I want to jump off a cliff.  When people sprinkle Bible verses around or wear shirts with pictures of Christ’s bloody thorns or lecture about God’s love on facebook, I definitely roll my eyes.  But I shouldn’t.  Exploration of faith, how we reveal it to others, whether we go to a service, whether we read a religious text – these are up to the individual believer.  I used to think there was some right way to do it, and I was always falling short.  And then, when I learned to think critically in college, I bristled at the thought of some other human telling me the right way to do something as vital and private as religious faith.  Over time, I learned that I could make it my own.  I go to church because I like it – the hymns, the Lord’s Prayer, the rhythm of the ancient service.  It gives me a feeling that I am connected to generations of church goers who repeated the Apostle’s Creed in cathedrals, chapels, houses, even closets.  I like the feeling of community I get when I go, and I like having my children as part of that community.  Our church also exposes us to service opportunities that we would have to work harder to find without it – we’ve built homes, raised money for natural disasters, fed the homeless and the poor (and all, I might add, without including acceptance of Christ as part of the package, which is an important caveat to me).  What draws me to this particular church is that its leaders, too, seem to be more focused on the struggle with understanding than with revealing some Absolute Truth.

I will continue to disavow the oppression of women and exploitation of the environment around the world while exploring my own patriarchal religion.  I will continue to struggle with the paradox that presents.  The deeper and more difficult my struggle, the closer I will feel to some kind of Truth.  The more sure I feel, the farther from Truth I’ll be.  My kids may grow up to be whatever religion they want (though as my fellow bloggers point out, people tend to be what their parents are).  They can adopt my Presbyterian faith if they want to or not, and I won’t care.  I care more that they adopt the idea of faith-as-personal, faith-as-service, and faith-as-struggle.  And even if they don’t – well, it will be the ultimate test of my more mature faith for me to accept whatever they do as their own.

So, hours later, Thus Endeth My Essay.