My first Sunday at St. Cosmus’ was lovely. I felt very welcomed. People seemed to enjoy my sermon and to be enthusiastic about having the Tilt/Weirdbird/Zag family around. And I had Saturday off, and this afternoon off, and I have tomorrow off – a good breather before starting another busy week. (more…)
For some reason, the hardest thing for me to come to grips with here is that I’m staying. This will keep being my office. The rhythm of this week will be, in many respects, the rhythm of every week. The liturgy walk-through we did today – I get to keep doing that stuff, every Sunday, until I get ordained a priest, and then I’ll get to do some different stuff too. But I’ll be here, in this place, with these people. Amazing – wonderful.
I guess I haven’t felt very rooted in a church for the past couple of years. And when I have been regular at a church, I haven’t had the same role regularly. Even as a seminarian at a Boston-area parish the year before last, I was only up at the altar, for example, every other Sunday or so – other weeks I was doing church school stuff. Who would have thought that it would be the regularity and stability of this role that, at this moment, is giving me such surprised joy?
I catch glimpses of myself in car windows, with my collar on, and think, Whoa, who’s that chick?
Last night, trying to overcome my nerves and fall asleep, I thought, I need a notebook!
I am one of those people who fixes things in my mind, and processes things, by writing them down. I take notes on conversations, thoughts, ideas. I suppose the blog is an extension of this in some sense, but the immediacy of writing something out longhand in a notebook seems to be really critical to my cognitive processing. (more…)
Today’s the day. Tilt’s first day of unemployment, and my first “day off”, since Mondays will be my regular off-day. I start tomorrow. Tilt joked that we should make batons representing the roles we’re passing off to each other – stay-at-home primary parent, and go-to-work primary breadwinner.
We’re both, I think, quite confident that this is the right change and the right moment. And we will both find a lot of joy in our new roles. There will also be some grief about the roles we’re leaving – and, undoubtedly, some amount of friction and confusion as the new order gets worked out.
I’m not sure what else to say about this right now, so I’ll just conclude with a song Zag sang us yesterday morning as we were all waking up:
Erupting, erupting, erupting, ‘rup, (to the tune of the third line of “Twinkle, twinkle”)
Erupting, erupting, erupting, ‘rup,
Erupting, erupting, erupting, ‘rup,
Go to sleep, my little volcano.
Moment 1: It is naptime and Zag cannot get himself still. He seems to accept the general idea of naptime and is lying down in bed, but his eyes are wide open and he keeps finding new games to play with his fingers – pushing on his nose, stroking the wall, playing with my jewelry. Over and over again I pause my soporific singing to say, “Please settle!” and he replies, “I am!” (more…)
I think I finally got today right.
I’ve been trying to be on vacation, really I have. I’m just not that good at it. I make lists of things I have to Accomplish, and then try to Accomplish them, and it’s not very much different from not being on vacation. But this morning – thanks to an ambitious day trip yesterday – I had no particular plans for the day. And I managed to keep it that way. (more…)
His name is Peekapah, and he’s much older, maybe 11, or 20. He sleeps in Zag’s room. He knows how to handle a gun and has been in a war. He can play baseball, but is usually too busy to teach Zag. He used to have a pet buffalo. He can drive. And he knows how to sing Compline in French.
Zag’s been in such a great mood this afternoon and evening. When I took over at bedtime to sing him to sleep, he asked for the cider song – a thoroughly silly song about sipping cider through a straw that I learned at camp many years ago. Then when I started to sing, he joined in and sang the whole song right along with me. This was somewhat counter to the singing-to-sleep project, but it was so sweet I didn’t argue; it’s the first time we’ve actually sung something together. (more…)
“Spanish Pipedream” is kind of the theme song of our move to the New House and the village. (Not so much the topless dancer part; more the chorus.)
The kid and the dog are so happy here. They love having a patio and yard to hang out on and in. The dog is noticeably happier than she was in Cambridge. She comes and does her happy dance at us several times a day, for no particular reason. Zag is a little sad that he doesn’t know any other kids yet – it seems to be intensifying his invisible-big-brother fantasies – but we’ll meet more kids soon enough. They’re around; we just haven’t crossed paths yet.
The only blot on our bucolic peace of mind is that Zag seems to be taking a long time getting over this cold. He seems totally fine in waking hours, but when he lies down to sleep, he gets very coughy after a while. It seems to be post-nasal drip (rather than, say, asthma), and it helps if we can get him to sleep propped up… but we’ve all lost some sleep dealing with it, over the past three nights. I don’t think it’s an allergy thing, though we’ll try changing the bedding. Y’all had such good advice on allergies and stinky houses; it feels good to have this community out there. Any bright ideas about kids with nighttime coughs?
I’m trying to catch up (by reading through the archives of the exhaustive and delightful Thinking Anglicans website) on GAFCON, the latest gathering of Episcopal and Anglican conservatives who are mad as hell and aren’t gonna take it anymore. I’ve only gotten up to GAFCON’s official start date, so I don’t have very fully-formed ideas about it yet. I’m hoping I develop some soon, since I’ve been asked to have an opinion in public (not so much on GAFCON, but on the whole Anglican kerfuffle) sometime soon. (more…)