Thomism

Thomas is home from school today and so I laxed a pretty solid house rule of no TV in the morning. He reminded me just how lax when he said, "Mommy, my TV brain is still watching TV!" after I told him a few times that he ought to turn it off.

Well, I finally came down hard: "TURN IT OFF NOW."

To which Thomas replied, "But mommy, if I turn it off, my TV brain will smack me!"

Reading Comprehension Quiz

Instructions: Read the following passage, then answer the questions below. 

Once upon a time, there was a mother who had eight children. The youngest was a little boy, toe-headed and slate blue-eyed, who seemed destined for greatness. As a child, he listened faithfully to the news on his radio and thought deeply about the problems of the world. Astounded adults would ask him questions about Russian and American politics which he could answer in great detail. In first grade, he complained that there was no discussion of negative numbers and as a third-grader, he read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He drew detailed pictures of Russian aircraft, contemplated the horrors of nuclear fallout in a Cold War era, and wrote a poem entitled, "Where does the sky end?" which won an Honorable Mention in the annual Reflections contest.

Of course, the little boy grew up to be a great man who became schooled in all the hard sciences--Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Pharmacology--as well as the liberal humanities of Rhetoric (Business Administration) and Law. But while work, study, and learning have required most of his time, he invests all of his emotional energies in an even higher calling: husband and father. As a result of both his accomplishments and his intense familial devotion, he is loved and admired by all who know him.

Questions:

1) Who is the person referenced in the above passage?

2) How old would this man be today?

3) How do you, the reader, feel about this person after reading this passage?

The Nobility of Motherhood

A few years ago when Thomas was about Sethie's age, I was in a Relief Society meeting, doing a short presentation on the "nobility of motherhood" to the group. Right on cue, the nursery leader showed up with Thomas. The smell from his diaper filled the entire room. Here it is, folks, the nobility of motherhood, in action. 

So this morning, I choose out an outfit that I thought would say "casual sophisticate". I like when the weather around here turns chilly again because I can do layers. I put on a flowy black tank gathered at the bustline over a white cotton button-down shirt with three-quarter sleeves. So for most of the day I've been going around, thinking I looked nice. 

Turns out when I changed Sethie's diaper this morning, he left me a little present on my sleeve and I have been parading around this big brown spot on my arm. What is it the French call it? "Eau de Toilette?"

Just call me noble.

The Day After

I want to thank everyone deeply for the heartfelt birthday wishes. I can't tell you how much fun it was yesterday to keep stopping by the computer and seeing the comments pile up. I often forget in the frenzy of daily life how many good friends are out there keeping tabs on us and the fact that you bother to check this blog at all is a sign of your care. I want you to know how much I love all of you and how grateful I am that you are a constant presence in my life.

Thomas managed both to make it to school (which is not nearly so impressive, since I drove him and dropped him off personally) and home, though the coming home was a little more dramatic. It took about an hour from the time school supposedly let out before his bus rattled onto our street and dropped him off. Speaking of rattled, that was me. I had foolishly left the number for the school back inside and didn't dare run back in to find it just in case the bus finally arrived. So I had Nate call them to find out what was going on. Apparently, it took nearly half-an-hour for the school to sort all the new little kindergartners onto the right buses and then Thomas's bus driver apparently didn't know that part of our road is closed off due to construction and got stuck trying to turn her rig around on a narrow road and come back the opposite way. When she arrived, I went running out to her, asking if she could possibly have my child on board and I was so relieved when she let him off that I thoroughly dampened him with both tears and slobbery kisses. 

You know, I was wondering why I was so worried about him heading off to kindergarten when he's been going to preschool for over a year and I realized it's about autonomy. There are going to be portions of his life now where it is just him getting himself where he needs to go, and he will be facing up to kids that are older than he is in an environment that is often uncontrolled. I know this is a standard parenthood fear, but I realized yesterday that I can look and wait for him, but I can no longer actively protect him all the time. 

The Hem song from the previous post would probably be more appropriate here because I realized as I was taking Thomas to school yesterday, I was carrying everything with me--my entire school experience, positive and negative--and fixating on him the weight of all these memories. I don't know. I'd be interested in hearing how other parents handled their kids-off-to-school fears and how the kids themselves succesfully navigated their newfound autonomy in a new world that is more peers than family.

Mara's B-day and new adventures

A very Happy Birthday to my beautiful wife!
Not only is it Mara's birthday, but it is also Thomas' first day at school. When I was discussing presents with her, Mara said that if Thomas makes it to and from school without incident, that would be the best present in the world. I am sure we will have a report on that soon.
Love ya babe!

Blue Grey Day

So we carry every sadness with us

Every hour our heart was broken

Every night the fear and darkness

Lay down with us

Hem, Half Acre

Unfortunately, I don't have many Intercourse, PA jokes to tell. You know the kind ("Nate took me out for dinner, then insisted we go straight to Intercourse") and I apologize to anyone who looking forward to them (You know who you are, ahem, Kristi ;) ). But we did stop there on our way out of Lancaster, hoping to find some souvenir item to take home. Other than some very lovely Amish furniture, almost everything was country kitsch--more 80's kitchen, than 1800s. And don't get me started on Kitchen Kettle Village which featured an embarrassing assortment of Amish-style fakery that would make even Jakey from the BBQ place tear his beard off.

So, instead, we headed east on Hwy. 30 toward Gettysburg. I'm not much of a Civil War buff, though I heard enough stories and watched enough documentaries with my dad when I was growing up to know the basic layout of the war. I know that Gettysburg was the turning point, that up until then Lee had been stomping his way to victory all over the backs of the union soldiers and that President Lincoln had been firing general after general as each one failed to bring about any change in the war's course. In school, I had seen such frothy period dramas as "North and South" and "The Blue and the Grey" and I'll admit that one of my all-time favorite films is "Gone with the Wind". I have to say if your heart doesn't burn a little with Atlanta during the penultimate first disc scene, then you probably don't have one.

But like I said, this is frothy history. The idea of the Civil War has taken on a certain romantic nobility--the gallant charges, the courageous last stands, the angelic ideals of the abolitionists, and the devil's cloud on the slave owners--it does make for a good miniseries. Unlike the rural Pennsylvania we passed through to get there, Gettysburg and its like have yet to grow derelict. From the somber battlefield memorials to the Central Park statue of Sherman in New York City, we seem recall the Civil War as a beacon on our nation's path to righteousness and regard its turn from confederate to union victory as inevitable, a collective wrestling with our souls that we had to win. Certainly, I have no regrets about it and have always thought of the Union army a bit like a favorite sports team--the fact that I have cheered them on means somehow I helped a little, right?

Anyway, the whole set-up is so familiar to me now that I wasn't quite prepared for how Thomas was going to take it.

First of all, the idea that someone might not like someone else simply because of the melanin count in their skin is so anathema to Thomas, it was difficult even explaining it. He's been very lucky to grow up in pretty ethnically diverse areas, from NYC to Ithaca to here and to him, kids are kids. I don't think he's pointed, stared, or even blinked at anyone who looked different from him because there's such a wide variety of people around him at all times, it hasn't even occured to him that someone could think that odd.

Moreover, for Thomas at this stage of his young life, the world is divided into good guys and bad guys. Everybody is on one team or the other and there is no moral middle. We've explained to him before, usually around Independence Day, that he is an American. Therefore to him, Americans are the good guy team because Thomas would never want to be on a bad guy team. Trying, then, to tell him that some Americans enslaved blacks for financial gain...well, that's a hard idea to swallow in the first place, but Thomas kept wondering, outloud no less, what the slaves had done to deserve it. Were they bad guys? Saying to him, no, no, they weren't bad guys and they hadn't done anything and these Americans had done it anyway...

Well, at some point, we just stopped trying to explain it because, thankfully, such bald-faced cruelty simply isn't part of his consciousness.

As we moved through the museum at Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Park, Thomas grew more and more quiet. We watched the History channel videos explaining each day of battle, stroked the muzzles of ancient cannons, looked at displays of guns, ammunitions, uniforms, and more. We used interactive displays to show him where the Confederate lines had attempted to overcome the Union road blocks into town and he stood before the wall of pictures of some of the nearly 50,000 men who died in just those three days of war.

Over and over again, he quietly asked, were those the good guys or the bad guys? Again, we tried to explain that while the Confederate cause--keeping slavery legal--was a terrible, wrongful thing, that didn't mean that all the men fighting for the Confederacy were bad men. He struggled very much with that, holding on to us and walking slowly and thoughtfully through the museum (anyone who knows Thomas should see the "slowly" and "thoughtfully" and say, "What?").

We did eventually get outside to tour the battlefield itself and while I thought that might settle on him even harder, it actually lightened his load quite a bit. Even with the monuments and old artillery scattered around, the out of doors is the out of doors and so he went running through the fields, chasing Sethie and letting himself be chased. I was relieved actually. He's too little to be so burdened by someone else's evil. Unfortunately, he has his whole life ahead of him to experience that.

*Tourism exploitation sidenote: In the museum gift shop, I was, frankly, shocked at some of the children's things they had there. They had t-shirts with both Union and Confederate uniforms emblazoned on them: the Confederate one said "Johnny Reb" on it and plenty of grey confederate caps to round out the outfits. Maybe this is just some version of "cops and robbers", but I couldn't imagine letting my kids run around in fake blue and grey, shooting at each other, even though I'm pretty liberal in the play-fighting area ("Thomas, you can pretend to whack your brother...just don't actually whack him"). And the confederate flag has always struck me as a middle finger to the country we pulled together and eradication of slavery by the blood of millions of Americans. Now it's a souvenir? Like I said...some things just aren't for sale.

Here are pictures from Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Park:

Nate and the kids on Emmitsburg Road, overlooking

the fields where the Union soldiers held their ground

Another shot off Emmitsburg Road

Sethie sits atop a cannon on Emmitsburg Road

Thomas on top the same cannon, looking thoughtful

Thomas and I walking the pathway that marks Pickett's Charge

Thomas and Sethie playing in the fields near Pickett's Charge