Happy Easter!

Once again, I fail at everything. If by everything, you mean "Taking a family Easter photo," anyway. I hosted visitors in my shoebox of a home, hefted my 18-lb three-month-old through an entire Easter vigil Mass, and kept everyone alive. So I guess I fail at one thing, although in ten years it will seem like a big thing. I got four total snaps of my kidlets:

No lie: this child consumed nothing but butter and chocolate cake for Easter lunch.

Drool bunny!

My happiest little boy.

The Easter Bunny brought an Our Lady of Guadalupe Shining Light doll (in her hand) and Tangled!

And one of myself with two of my five sisters:

Two of my little sisters, only one of whom is little.

...But with all the kiddie wrangling (at a restaurant, for reasons that I will get into shortly), I never managed to get a snap with my husband and both kids at once. Oh well -- onward!

The Amazon in coral up there is my youngest sister, Michaela. She's only 19, which is why she's so disgustingly fresh-faced. ;) Her boyfriend, Dan, was initiated into the Church during the Easter vigil. My parents, my sister Briana, my sister Bridget (and her husband, Chalie, and her 1.5 year old son, Logan), and the aforementioned Michaela came down from Pennsylvania. Then they and we went back up partway to the University of Maryland, where Dan is at school and where he completed RCIA. Dan's parents had a small reception for him before the 8pm Easter vigil, and then Michael and Chalie brought the toddlers back to our house to go to bed. I kept Declan with me, with the intention of passing him around during the vigil so no one had to hold the Heaviest Baby in the World for hours.

{Well. That part didn't work out. I spent the procession and the first several readings nursing a fussy baby in the hall (thankfully I was able to move close enough to hear!), and then he finally passed out. Declan is like his sister in that he refuses to sleep on my shoulder, but insists on being cradled against my body to sleep, and in general prefers his own space for sleeping. By the end of the vigil, I could barely feel my left arm! Lucky he's so cute!}

The best part of the story is that Dan's grandfather got to co-celebrate the Mass! And he's not a deacon.

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Wait, what?

Dan is English. He was born in England but moved to the States when he was a year old with his parents. Around the time that Dan's parents emigrated, Dan's grandfather, who was an Anglican minister, converted to Roman Catholicism. He went through two years of seminary, and then sought and received a dispensation from St. Pope John Paul II to become a priest even though he's married with children.

It was a very emotional moment when Dan's grandfather administered the Blood of Christ to his grandson for the first time. I'm sure he's been praying for decades that his grandson would come to know the fullness of the love of Christ and his Holy Church here on Earth. It was an honor and privilege to be present for this blessed event. Congratulations -- and welcome! -- to Daniel Dominic!

Sorry for the poor quality! Dan is in the back row, third from the left. His grandfather is in the front row, second from the right.

On Easter Sunday my parents threw a lunch for us and for Dan's family (his parents, grandparents and two brothers) at a restaurant because although I was willing to host at my house my mom just didn't want everyone to have to cram in. And they would have had to cram, because this place is just so tiny. So we had a lovely lunch out -- if you ignore my daughter's less-than-ideal behavior, which I could not -- and then almost everyone hit the road. My sister, brother-in-law and nephew stayed the night and the kids had a ball together until they left this morning.

iPad Miles from Tomorrowland party in Keira's crib. At 6:30am.

And that's my Easter! Hope yours was lovely and blessed.

Grateful.

I have three posts started and not finished, which makes me twitchy. I imagine some people work ("work") that way all the time but I'm more of a start-a-task-and-finish-it person. Ideally.

But!

Instead of finishing any of them, I'm going to write about something else entirely!

I'm taking a quick pumping break from work and I was just thinking about how grateful I am that my kids are doing so well at their new daycare. When Declan was about a week old, we got the devastating news that our old daycare provider, Stephanie, who had cared for Keira since she was three months old, was closing down on the last Friday of March. It's a long story that amounts to the county regulating her out of business -- and I had best leave it at that or else I'm apt to go on a LONG rant about the evils of big government -- but I lost it a little bit at hearing the news.

If you've ever been a working mother, you know what it's like, adjusting to the idea that someone else is going to be responsible for your sweet baby eight-to-ten hours a day. It's really, really hard. No one else is capable of loving them like you do, even if there are plenty of people capable of keeping them safe and fed. It gets easier over time, committing them to someone else's care, but the beginning is the worst.

I had been through it once and I was counting on it being easier with Declan, since Stephanie had done such a wonderful job with Keira.

So finding out that Stephanie couldn't do it anymore was a real blow. It didn't help that I heard about it 9 days postpartum when my hormones were a-ragin'. I cried and cried. Then I put off finding new care for way too long. We did the math -- might it be better if I quit my job and stayed home with the kids? Could we afford healthcare and the loss of my salary? -- and eventually realized that I had to keep my job. In the meantime, a couple of the other daycare moms had found another in-home daycare, in Stephanie's same daycare, which had room for more kids and was significantly less expensive to boot. We went to interview Subhadra, and although I had some reservations (not least that she told us that some of her current kids call her "Mom," which I did. not. want.) we decided to enroll our kids with her along with Keira's friends Reagan and Jackson.

They started with her on Monday. Michael has been handling drop-off, and I was so, so relieved that I wasn't going to have to be party to the total meltdown I expected Keira to have as she was left with a stranger. Then Michael called and said that drop-off had been great -- Keira was excited to see her friends and she sent him off with a kiss and a "Bye, Daddy!" and he gave me the good news that the kids were going to be calling the new nanny Subu. (Thank goodness!)

Every other morning this week, my not-a-morning-person toddler has woken up and said, "I going to Subu's house!" She's having a wonderful time there. The baby is eating and sleeping well. They're safe and happy. And I'm so grateful they have a wonderful place to be.

Thanks be to God.

7QT: March 20, 2015

Linking up with Kelly for 7 Quick Takes!

1) Happy first day of spring! It is flipping snowing.


2) This is the end of my second week back to work after maternity leave. I miss my little man, and he misses me. So far at daycare he's opted to eat or sleep, and not a single day has he done both. His record for eating there is something like 10 ounces of breastmilk in a whole day (so much is getting wasted! Waaaaah!), and yesterday he drank four. All day. Four ounces. This from a kid who is not even three months old and already weighs 15 lbs. But he slept over five hours, so there's that. And he spends his evenings like this:

Blooooooooob.

3) I got so much work done these past two weeks; my job depends so much on having a full pipeline and obviously after twelve weeks off my pipeline is somewhat diminished, so that's a big deal. As a reward I spent my lunch break yesterday seeing Cinderella. Disney has a history of getting things very wrong, in my opinion, but they got this one right. I give the credit to Kenneth Branagh -- although I really want to know who's responsible for Helena Bonham-Carter's teeth. She couldn't talk around them! And that is literally my only complaint. I'll be buying this one for my daughter, who at two is not ready for the movie theatre.

Have courage, and be kind.


4) During my last week of maternity leave, my husband happened to be traveling for work. My mom and sister came into town from Pennsylvania for two of the four days to help me out with the kids. While they were here, we sent the toddler to daycare one day and we did an epic cleanout of my closet. You may remember that my Lenten sacrifice has been shopping; I had enough clothing for... I don't even have an apt comparison. It was a horrorshow. I opened my closet door and my sister actually gasped. I didn't take a "before" picture, even though it occurred to me to do so, because it was so bad that even for the sake of an extreme before-and-after I just couldn't show anyone.

We went through every. single. item. My sister went home with a whole new wardrobe; my mom took quite a few pieces too (plus some for a couple of my other sisters and my sister-in-law). When he got back, my husband still dropped off 8-10 garbage bags of donation items. And my closet is still full. Just not over-full. Look!

To the left, to the left.

Straight on.

Aaaaaand the other side!

Furthermore, I'm implementing a strict "item-in, item-out" rule when I'm allowed to shop again, but I think I'll be doing less of that anyway now that I know what I have. Being able to see what I own and being able to find what I need are amazing.


5) I had a bunch of stuff that was brand new with tags or very gently used that I don't need, so I'm going to be selling it through ThredUP. I ordered a cleanout bag from them but I haven't yet sent it in. I have a laundry basket full of items to send in and now that I've seen how big the bag is I think I'm going to need at least two more! I'll report back on my experience.


6) Did I mention that it's snowing? I am so completely over winter, you guys. This year just seemed particularly horrible. I had a sweet baby to snuggle, which helped some, but it was so cold and icy all the time that I never took him out so we were just in the house all the time. I'm ready for spring to get here for real and stick around!


7) As someone who struggles with meal planning, I have to say I did really well this week! On Monday I made ham-and-cheese quiche, on Tuesday for St. Paddy's I made shepherd's pie...

This is before the baking step, obviously. I used Irish cheddar for the top too, obviously.

...On Wednesday I forgot to defrost the frozen chicken so we had leftover shepherd's pie, and yesterday I made roast chicken with asparagus and creamy parmesan rice. And tonight I am OFF DUTY.

Me + Followthrough = Largely Theoretical

Two days in a row I half-wrote (different!) blog posts in the shower, in my head. And then promptly forgot everything. Two (different!) topics, fairly well fleshed-out during the length of a mom-shower (so, you know, short -- I think much faster than I write), just gone.

I'm going to put a notebook in the bathroom next time. This is getting ridiculous.

Stay tuned!

P.S. My hand smells like barf and I have no idea why. I'm still damp from the shower. What the heck.

Read...

This.

It's a long read, but worth it. I'll be back in a couple of days to discuss, once I've finished absorbing.

Lent 2015

Lent begins in 11-ish days. Usually I haven't even begun to think about my Lenten sacrifice by this point; shamefully, it's usually three or four days into Lent before I have decided what to give up.

This morning, I looked into my disaster area of a closet and immediately realized what I'm being called to do this year: I need to give up buying stuff.

I'm a great bargain shopper. I have a closet jammed full of stuff: clothes, shoes, purses, accessories. Almost everything in there was at least 30% off, and more usually upwards of 50% off, when I bought it. However: I have enough clothes to outfit five of me for a month and hardly repeat a stitch (this assumes that the five of me range in size, but two or three of me at my current size would be well clothed).

I need for nothing. (Except to stop buying stuff.)

So this Lent, I'm going on a spending diet. I will not be buying -- no matter the discount -- clothes, shoes, accessories, purses, or makeup. I may buy things like shampoo and toothpaste if I need them, but beyond that I may not spend on myself. And Sundays are not a cheat day, like it would be if I were giving up, say, Diet Coke. (And I stand firmly behind the Sunday cheat day, for reasons that Kendra explains more eloquently than I ever could. As always.)

Not only is this going to be really hard for me, but it's going to be good for our family. I haven't fully made the transition from our dual-income, childless lifestyle to our one-and-a-half income, dual-child lifestyle. I wouldn't say I overspend, precisely -- at least not in the sense that I'm spending money that we don't have -- but I could certainly be more responsible.

And it starts in 11 days.

Now, the challenge will be not hoarding new stuff between now and then. Pray for me, friends.