It’s possible, of course, that none of them will offer me a job. I can imagine a dynamic where I look really attractive on paper, and seem interesting and fun in person, but where ultimately they worry about my experience level and offer the job to another candidate. That would be OK; I’m not in a hurry yet. This is all moving a bit fast for me, really. We shall see….

I swing back and forth between being totally preoccupied by all this (spending hours poring over real estate listings in various towns, trying to imagine life there – Tilt sometimes joins me or incites me in this), and not thinking about it at all – throwing myself, instead, into wholeheartedly planning our big crafting evening in late October… And I swing back and forth, likewise, between being excited and curious about what this next step will bring, and feeling keenly  how much I love our life here and the people we know and the place we live, and how much there will be to miss…

Wheeeeee.

2. What’s with the guilt? So I blog once a month. So I’ve abandoned several sewing projects half-finished, and am now on a knitting tear. So I’m making extremely intermittent progress in my self-paced study to become a La Leche League leader. Why feel guilty about all these things? Nobody is being harmed. Why can’t I just blog or sew or read about breastfeeding when I feel like it and have time, or else, not?

3. I love my son so very much. He’s a wonderful kid. Why do I spend so much of evey day yelling at him? Well, only rarely yelling, but a lot of that sharp unfriendly parent voice. Is there something i can change in myself – given all the constraints of the rest of life – that would help our day to day relationship have more of the texture and tone of my real feelings about him?

Please submit your responses below.

2. My son is so much like me. He’s been in swim classes at the town pond, the past couple of weeks. I took him to class on my day off, last Monday. Before class and in the car, he was fretting about whether the teachers would make him put his face underwater, like they had the previous week. I tried to comfort and encourage him. Then we got to the pond and he went straight into the water and put his face under, a couple of times. I recognize that thought process: “Somebody is going to make me do something hard and I hate that, so I’m going to either avoid the situation, or take control of it and do the hard thing myself before soembody makes me.” We don’t like being bad at things, Zag and I…. including, irrationally enough, things we have never done before in our lives. I believe that Tilt is more at peace with being a learner, when occasion warrants, than I am. I hope some of that rubs off on our kids.

3. There is more death around these days than is quite comfortable. My church has had five funerals or memorials within three or four weeks – very, very unusual for us. No real pillars of the community, but one such pillar is in hospice care, so that’s on the horizon. And my boss’s daughter, a young mother in her late 20s, is really really sick. I have been giving serious thought to how to handle Sunday morning if she does not pull through. Phew. Dealing with death is part of this vocation, and a very important part, precisely because normal people do not usually have to deal with clusters of deaths or crises. Guess I’m on the steep part of the learning curve, here.

4. I’ve just been off work for nearly a week. It’s been terrific. Day trips, berry picking, playing and reading with Zag – I’m feeling much more in touch with him than I was a week ago. Holding my daughter while she falls asleep. Talking with my husband. Lots of sewing, and some very rewarding shopping. An eye exam and new glasses, ordered today. Bedroom rearranged and babyproofed. Yard sale accomplished and mostly cleaned up after. It’s been so good. Going back to work tomorrow will be really hard for a out 15 minutes, then I’ll remember that I love my job….

Maybe this will mean a whole new era of more frequent blog posts, here at Weird Bird central. Maybe it will be easier for me to get around to posting stories and thoughts more often, on my cute little laptop device. They will have to be rather brief stories and thoughts, since the typing is rather more cumbersome than on an actual keyboard. Perhaps it will be a useful corruptive for my tendency to verbosity.

Let me see, what can I post now, to celebrate? I ran into a neighbor today who has a five year old relative visiting. The neighbor and said relative ran into Zag and Tilt today, out and about. Upon learning that the other child was also five, Zag remarked gravely, “Lots of people are five, at around this age.”

I started crocheting early in grad school, I think, in my mid-20s. Then I became dissatisfied with the clunkiness of crochet (at least, of my crochet) and learned to knit. I liked knitting; if I picked a simple-enough pattern, and used a chunky enough yarn to enable me to finish the project before my attention span gave out, it came out looking nice and polished and professional.

Then my mom got me a decent sewing machine, to replace the ’60s-vintage one I’d been trying to learn on. I messed around with my nifty new machine some, but I don’t think I really got into it until I was pregnant with Zag. I had been knitting cute little baby hats, and suddenly I figured out that I could sew a cute little baby hat (out of various upcycled knit fabrics) in, like, an eighth of the time it took to knit one. I still knit some – it’s different from sewing – but my primary loyalties went to machine sewing, because it was FAST. And if you didn’t peer too closely at my seams, it could look pretty finished and professional, too.

I’ve knit a little off and on in the years since Zag’s birth – I made him a sweater once, the only sweater I’ve ever finished (and one of only two I’ve ever undertaken). I appreciate knitting. But it takes both hands and lots of time. Machine sewing takes both hands and less time – possibly a lot less time, depending on the project. I admire sweet knit softies; I appreciate their workmanship and am sometimes tempted to make one. But I can whip up a pretty cute machine-sewn softie in an hour, if I can find the time to myself.

All of this is just to explain why I’m surprised to find myself suddenly hand-sewing and crocheting.

A few weeks ago, I decided to hold off on making any more clothing for my kids for a month or so – they both have adequate summer wardrobes, and who knows what size they’ll be by the fall? But I wanted to sew more, so I found a pattern for a cloth brimmed hat that I liked for Zag, in one of my issues of Ottobre. (Note to Baba Yaga: You can put next year’s Ottobre subscription on my Christmas list now. I love it.) I machine-sewed a couple of versions, but was having trouble getting around to the hand-finishing they needed; same with a little pair of cloth slippers I was making for the Bean. So I took them all with me when we went out of town together for a few days. And I sewed them, by hand. And I kind of enjoyed it. So when I started making another of the hats, I sewed it by hand. (Not quite done yet, so the verdict is still out.)

And then I saw a crocheted child’s sweater somewhere, all different shapes and lacy bits and colors, organic in a way you can’t achieve with knitting, and I fell in love with it. So I bought a couple of crochet hooks, having lost any I had once owned, and started playing. I’ve made about seven flowers so far, and am pondering ways to integrate them into some garment for the Bean.

Hand-sewing and crochet are both slow  (for me). They’re both flexible and forgiving. You can see what you’re doing, stitch by stitch, and it’s pretty easy to back up a few stitches if you go wrong. Crocheted and hand-sewn projects don’t come out looking polished – at  least, not from my hands – but I’ve decided they have their own charm. And most importantly, they are portable, hand-work projects. I can take them with me in the car, or to a presentation or meeting, or into my son’s room to keep him company while he plays. Right now, that’s fitting into my life a whole lot better than machine-sewing, which demands uninterrupted time off by myself. I get some of that, but there are lots of things to squeeze into the little bit I get (like, say, blogging)… and when both kids are in bed, I’d really like to hang out with my husband, not hunker down with my sewing machine.

So I’ll see how far I can go with this hand-work trend, with these wonderfully slow and small-scale means of creating. If and when the baby settles into a dependable bedtime and we have more consistent kid-free time every evening, maybe I’ll get back to the machine. Or maybe I won’t. Slow is good for me; it doesn’t come naturally. Maybe I should stick with it, as a spiritual discipline.

As of a few days ago, you’ve been in our lives for five full years. You’ve made us into parents –  from those first astonishing panicky hours when we suddenly had responsibility for this fragile pink demanding little creature, to the day-to-day ebb and flow of parenting your preschooler self – sorting Playmobil together, arguing over brushing your teeth, negotiating snacks vs. candy, reading before bed. I can neither remember or imagine life without you, life before you. What on earth did we do to keep ourselves busy?

I want to write something about what you’re like at this age, but it’s hard to capture you in words. You are bright and imaginative and lively and always off on some mental track or another. Mornings can be hard because you wake all the way up, instantly, and want to talk and sing and make faces at your baby sister, while your father and I are still groaning and trying to get our eyes open. We joke about you with a line from the movie This Is Spinal Tap – “This one goes to eleven” – meaning that you often seem to go a notch higher, in energy and intensity, than anyone else around. You’re not always a wild boy; you can be very focused and thoughtful – but you are always working something over – imagining something, planning something, creating something. We hear, “Pretend that you’re…” a hundred times a day.

You’re making good progress on reading yourself (you read “Skidmore” on a friend’s T-shirt with very little help today) and you love to be read to. Asterix is perhaps your very favorite – you mull over the comics, and beg us to read them to you – but you love everything. Every three to four days, we have to put a stack of books a foot tall back onto the bookcase, because you’re constantly pulling out more books to peruse. Reading to you at bedtime is a wonderful routine – we’re working our way through Swallows and Amazons right now, and all enjoying it.

It’s fun to listen to you talk – there are so many words and ideas in your head. You can be very grown-up in your language… I notice examples and smile to myself, but they slip away so fast (you keep talking, for one thing) that I never manage to write one down! Like your parents,  you’re never going to have any trouble with verbal skills. It makes it a lot of fun to talk with you – we can have a real conversation. I love driving around with you in your booster seat behind me; we have some good talks – about school, about things we hear on the radio, about whatever is on our minds.

We argue, because you’re energetic and strong-willed, but there’s never any question about the love in our family. You always, always want a hug and kiss from me before I leave the house for my work day or a meeting. You’ll be caught up in your Playmobil project, or whatever, when I say goodbye, and you’ll say, “Bye, love you too,” but then as I’m walking through the kitchen towards the door I’ll hear you shout, “Hug and kiss?” you’ll come racing downstairs to catch me, holding up your arms to me. My son.

You’re wonderful with your sister. You’re still learning the boundaries of what’s safe for her – keeping small toys away, and being aware of your body when you’re around her so you don’t kick her accidentally, that sort of thing. But you really love talking to her and making her smile and laugh, and you’re really interested in her. Sometimes you’re being so loud and wild right in her face that your dad and I are on the verge of telling you to tone it down, but the Bean is grinning and laughing. So, OK, she likes it. You’re a good brother, and she’s always going to worship you.

There’s so much I could say and nothing feels like it captures what it’s like sharing our lives with you. I hope you know how deeply we love you. You are just luminous to me, a source of light – you’re aglow with bright ideas and energy and curiosity and affection. Today while everyone drank lemonade on the church lawn after the 10am service, you ran over to me and grabbed my hand to drag me over to where other kids were playing. “Come on!” you told me urgently. “You’re a priest! You can tell the other kids that they shouldn’t be wrecking the ants’ homes!” I appreciate the reminder to use my authority where it matters. I hope that I always come through for you, that I’m at least mostly worthy of your trust in me.

I love you so very much. I loved you zero and one and two and three and four, and I love you five and look forward to seeing what adventures this year brings. My sweet son.

Your mama always and always,

Weirdbird

The youth & young adult ministry umbrella includes campus ministries, since college students are either youth or young adults (exactly which may have to be decided on a case-by-case basis).

About six weeks ago, a panicked priest who does campus ministry stuff contacted me (for lack of anyone more knowledgeable to contact) to see how she was supposed to get her annual funding for her ministry from the diocese. Our 2010 budget included some amount of money to continue supporting several existing Episcopal or ecumemical campus ministries around the state, and there was no clear process in place for disbursing those funds. In conversation with our diocesan CFO, who is a very good soul, and with the person who did campus ministry stuff for the diocese until his position got defunded, also a very good soul, I managed to put together a letter and a rough application process and get it out to the people associated with those ministries. In the course of this process, I learned how many campus ministries we have and who runs them or works with them. I still don’t have all the campuses and people straight in my head, but thanks to the CFO, at least I’ve heard of them all. Let me stress: I knew nothing about all of this until someone from diocesan headquarters filled me in.

So why, exactly, did I just have to spend fifteen minutes on the phone with the administrator at diocesan headquarters, strenuously arguing (in the face of some opposition) a) that campus ministries DO exist in this diocese, and b) that they should be represented on the new diocesan website? Why, o why, o why?

(Part of why is that the CFO is out of town. But I find it pretty disturbing that apparently nobody else at HQ knows about these ministries which do, in fact, exist, and are, in fact, supported – at least a little – by our annual budget.)

This is a good diocese in lots of ways & I’ll be sorry to leave it. But this just seems like the latest installment in their really remarkable corporate short-sightedness regarding ministry for and with young people.

Miss Level is silent a moment, then sighs. “Not many of us are that good,” she says. “If I was that good, we wouldn’t be going to visit old Mr. Weavall again today.”

This is why I love Terry Pratchett. His books are fun and funny and peculiar and surprising, but what wins my loyalty and love is the dash of keen insight he tosses in here and there, almost incidentally. Right here, in that little exchange, he has nailed pastoral leadership.

If you’re a good priest, you help people. If you’re a really good priest, you get them to help each other, and to help themselves.

Just like Granny Aching. Or, well, Jesus.

This post is dedicated to my friend Jen, who was ordained to the priesthood yesterday! May we both manage to be really good witches, friend.

I was a little worried that a vacation spent right here in our home sweet home would not feel sufficiently vacation-y. Turns out it was splendid. True, I didn’t rest much – I have to be out of my own space to be able to just relax with a book; at home there’s always another project. But it was a lot of fun to have enough time to recklessly start new projects, and even finish a few. Example: Zag’s birthday party, four weeks hence, will be Ancient Egypt-themed. We made Sculpey scarabs and ushabti figurines (from Sculpey molds, made from actual artifacts I happened to have around…) to hide in the sandbox for one activity, and alligator-board paper dolls of a number of Egyptian gods for a storytelling session. And I printed out everyone’s names in hieroglyphics, for the invitations. And bought chocolate rocks for the archaeology cake.

Mostly it was just wonderful to have time to enjoy my children (and my husband, to the extent possible with a baby and a preschooler in the house). I’m feeling rather reluctant to return my nose to the grindstone tomorrow. I’m sure that as soon as I’ve been there for an hour or two, I’ll remember that I love my job…

Here’s my daughter yesterday, in the lovely sun, in her new-to-us Jumperoo, which is terrific…

And here’s my son, with the new doll he was VERY EXCITED to buy at the nearby flea market. It looks like he’s waterboarding him or something, but actually he’s pretending the doll was helping clean up the Gulf oil spill, and fell in the oil, and has to be washed off.

Lots more recent photos are up on our Smugmug site, thanks to Tilt.

So the Bean and I took a walk this morning, she riding like a queen in her expensive stroller. (Embarrassed as I am about owning something as yuppie as a Bob stroller, it really is pretty damn nice.) And because, as usual, I cannot find my cell phone, I had to just think about things instead of calling and chatting with my mom. And I thought about the initial phone interview I have scheduled this afternoon with a parish a few hours’ drive from my parents. I’m not in love with it, but they seem nice and it has potential, and it will be good practice, if nothing else.

And then I started thinking about my trajectory of development as a pastor, and what I want and need from my next position. I feel like I’ve had reasonably good opportunities to grow and improve my skills and deepen my understanding in a lot of areas at St. Cosmus’ – as a preacher; as a liturgist; in the areas of Christian formation for kids, youth, and adults; as a collaborative leader sharing projects and responsibilities with the lay leadership of my parish. The biggest piece that’s been absent here, for me, is sustained meaningful engagement with outreach.

“Outreach” is church jargon for doing stuff for other people. In a lot of churches, it means sending a check to the denominational charitable entity now and then, maybe some volunteer shifts at the homeless shelter or the soup kitchen, a food drive for the local pantry a few times a year, maybe something special around the holidays – a fundraiser for Heifer International or an opportunity for people to bring in gifts for poor children. In a few churches, it means something much more. It means that they genuinely think of themselves as a community of service, called together to do what Jesus would do if he lived in their time and place, as best as they can discern it. That can take a lot of forms, because it’s profoundly contextual, but you know it when you see it.

St. Cosmus’ is solidly in the former category. There are people who would like it to develop a deeper and more cohesive sense of outreach, of being sent into the world to do good. And I think the potential is there, if the right project or need came along. When I started working here, I had hopes that I could be part of that process, but I was smart enough to know that it couldn’t be my project. Watching various outreach opportunities rise and fall over the past two years, I’m even more convinced that whatever they take on has to be their idea, and has to generate some momentum without/before clergy intervention, to be sustainable.

So I don’t think I’m going to be here long enough to see outreach blossom at St. Cosmus’. And I think it might be important to me that outreach be a big part of life in my next parish. Because if I spend the next six or seven or eight years – if I come to maturity as a priest – in a parish of the type described above, that writes checks and sends cans to the food pantry and basically feels like that’s enough and/or that’s all they can possibly do, I’m afraid I’ll start to get locked into that mindset. The fire for meaningful service that burns in my belly – fueled by my reading of Jesus in the Gospels, by a graduate degree in anthropology and time spent living in the developing world, and by a seminary education at possibly the most liberal of my denomination’s seminaries – will gradually get smothered by more and more inertia and busyness and political wrangling and cynicism. I feel it happening a little bit already.

And then I might never get the chance to be part of a church that’s grappling seriously with the question of what Jesus would do. Because why would a place like that want to hire me, if I get that far in my career without being involved in any real, dynamic, significant outreach work?

So I guess it’s good that I took a walk and couldn’t find my phone. Because now maybe I have something to help me discern, as I begin the first of many conversations with the first of many parishes that meet my basic criteria: basically healthy parish, take Christian formation and spirituality seriously, some scope for playing with liturgy, and driving distance from one or both sets of grandparents.

What do you think, readers? Some of you are churchy people, and some of you know me very well. Your thoughts would be welcome.