You've got to be kidding me

I was having a pretty good day until I saw this.

I don't care how anyone spins it. This is beyond disgusting, beyond foul. I find it difficult to believe a sincere seeker and lover of Christ could think this is a good thing. Are you kidding me?

So wrong on so many levels. I just can't even believe it. The words fleecing the flock come to mind. And wolves in sheeps' clothing. And tares among the wheat. And hearts that are far, far from Christ.

Sorry if anyone is offended, but I gotta call them as I see them.

Say it isn't So

Messy Christian is signing off and closing up shop.

I don't remember exactly how it was I stumbled across Liz's blog. I may have been Googling something church-related and one of her posts showed up at the top of the results. I do remember that the name "Messy Christian" struck me as intriguing, so I had to go check it out.

Imagine my surprise then to find someone, halfway around the world, who'd been experiencing many of the same struggles and trials I'd been going through in an abusive church. It was like opening a vein. I wrote a personal email to Liz (poured my guts out was more like it) and she wrote back a very nice and empathetic reply. I still have it in my inbox, as a matter of fact.

She took the time not only to listen but to encourage me to tell my own story, in my own words. And that's how this blog, Feeble Knees, eventually came to be (in case you didn't know) because a kind soul on the opposite end of the world cared for me and my predicament and took it upon herself to help me down the path a bit.

So I'm really bummed that she's decided to pull the plug. I am definitely going to miss my virtual visits to Malaysia, her candor, frankness, sharp mind and wit. Hopefully this won't be the last we hear from her. It better not be!

Thank you for everything Liz, my fairy blogmother. If we don't ever get to have that hot chocolate in KL or Beantown, at least we'll have time enough to catch up on the Other Side. But until then, please don't be a stranger. And let us know if the spirit ever moves you to start blogging again. You'll get some instant link love from your old buddy Feeble.

Grace and strength and peace to you from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

I'll say so long for now, but I will not say goodbye.

Surprises

A short list of the things that surprise me the most about my life as a mom at the moment.

1. We're still nursing. Seems like eons ago I was throwing myself extravagant pity parties and thinking about how I couldn't wait to wean. Ha. I've since learned that nothing else soothes Bug off to sleep like a little "mumma time", especially when he's teething. Now I'm wondering how on earth I could ever give up this powerful weapon in my mommy arsenal.


2. That he sleeps through the night. I'm still scarred by our first five months where it was not uncommon for him to wake up every hour and a half. Every morning we wake up without having to tend to him several times in the middle of the night I'm still somewhat astounded. It took me awhile to get over my fear that he'd succumbed to SIDS. Sometimes when he naps longer than an hour (which isn't often) I still worry.


3. How much joy I get just looking at him. Ok, the first few months were rough and there wasn't as much joy as stress for a long while. But now I get the hugest high just watching him look at things, watching him think and examine a toy thoughtfully. Every new thing he learns just makes me bust with pride.


4. How funny he is. Maybe it's just my mommy goggles, but this kid is a real hoot sometimes. Nothing in this world has ever made me laugh the way he can. A fit of giggles from him can lift me out of the worst funk.


5. How dealing with tragedy and stressful situations is so different now. We've had a couple of scary things happen recently. It never dawned on me before how tough it is on parents. You don't have the luxury of falling onto the couch and crying or rushing out the door to go save the day. There's this little person here who doesn't understand or know what's going on; all he knows is he needs lunch, or his diaper's wet, or it's his bedtime. Having children means you have to keep pushing through everything that comes your way, be it tragedy, calamity, or conundrum. Even if you understand that in theory before you have kids, living through it is a whole other ball of wax. Having been the type of person to drop everything to go put out fires in other peoples' lives, this has been a big-time adjustment. Bug comes first, then I do what I can for everyone else. Big change for me.


6. I become physically sick when I hear about terrible things happening to children. It is a real, visceral thing. Even before Bug I was the type to cry watching the news - I've always been a bit of a sensitive soul, I guess. But now - now I find myself stopping people mid-conversation when they start relating the details of some terrible incident that resulted in the death of a child. I can't handle it. Maybe I'll get tougher again when Bug grows up, but right now I can't bear to hear it. Only just recently I stopped crying every time I remembered this poor little girl and her mommy. Even now I can't think on it too much. Actually I just realized Bug is almost the same age she was when she was shot dead, allegedly by her own father. I can't take it.


7. And, on a related note: how much more protective I am of all children. Recently someone told me about a study where a fake child abduction was staged in a public place. The child was instructed to scream and yell and fight off a man who would come and try to take him away (the child was prepped for this ahead of time). A man came, took the kid by the hand and the kid threw a fit as the man whisked him away. The frightening thing was that no one did anything. Plenty of people saw it happening, but no one intervened. (This made me physically sick too).
   
   I was at the supermarket recently and watched in horror as a mother left her two month old infant in the carseat on top of her carriage and walked away up several aisles to go get something she forgot. My first instinct was to go watch over the little boy until she returned. I swore that if anyone tried to lay a finger on that little guy I was going to body slam the person into the floor. The intensity of these feelings is really quite something. I've never engaged in a physical fight with anyone in my life, but I'd beat the stuffing out of anyone who tried to take a kid. No doubt about it.

And lastly the thing that surprises me the most, given all the difficulty we had with Bug for the first few months of his life is that I'm already looking forward to the day we have another child - not that we're in any rush! But it really surprises me, the depth of my feelings about wanting to have another. It's almost primal, not something I can easily describe or rationalize.

Dispatch from the Front

So I had a few precious minutes to peruse some mommy blogs, and what to my wondering eyes did appear, but a link to this blog listed under Blogs in Focus This Week over at Actual Unretouched Photo.

Ack! I feel like I've been caught at home by Ed McMahon and the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes Prize Patrol with unbrushed teeth, bed-head and a leaky nursing bra.

Hi Mel. Hi folks from Mel's. If you're reading this, thanks for stopping by, I do appreciate it. I'm sorry I haven't had more to offer here lately, but this college-educated, former hi-tech professional has been busy cleaning up spit-up, changing poopy diapers, picking up a million plastic baby toys and getting my feet repeatedly run over by a wild-eyed eight-month-old in a walker.

I know Linda R. Hirshman would be perfectly horrified.

I'd love to have her here for tea.

In between diaperings, (Bug's, not mine) we could discuss my former career in the software world, during which I collected a ridiculously fat paycheck for work that had little or no socially redeeming value and did absolutely squat for the cause of women worldwide. I'd give her the names and addresses of a whole slew of female (and male) working friends who regularly get together to lunch and inevitably end up discussing how depressed and unfulfilled they are in their big-honking-paycheck/technically-challenging jobs. They'd probably lie and tell her what she wants to hear to get their names in print. (Ha. Just kidding. Sorta.) But I know what they really think about what they're doing every day, some of them six and seven days a week, for companies who would think nothing of laying them all off and shipping their jobs overseas.

*Ahem*

But I digress.

Recently we had the occasion to entertain some child-free friends, one of whom works at a Very Big Company that pretty much dominates the world, but shall remain nameless here. This person has the Important Job, the Money, the House, the Travel Excursions, and more Professional Achievement than Ms. Hirshman could probably manage in a lifetime. But the most striking thing, after getting reacquainted again years and one eight-month-old later, was the lifelessness - the ennui - that emanated from this accomplished professional. Yeah these friends could talk about this big conference or that big multi-million dollar project or those exotic trips halfway around the world, but when they got all done flashing the style, there wasn't a whole heck of a lot of substance. They looked bored to hear themselves talk.

I don't think I'm missing anything here. Maybe other people do. More power to them.

It's not that I want to pick a fight with Ms. Hirshman, or anyone else for that matter. Personally I'd prefer it if folks on both sides of the so-called Mommy Wars would at least agree to hold off the next salvo until I finish switching a load of laundry around. 'Cause you know I got enough to do here before I can afford myself the luxury (yes, there I said it, luxury) of letting my grey matter wander off to contemplate whether or not I should be feeling fulfilled. Am I fulfilled? Maybe I'll let you know once I finally get some lunch - or more than two contiguous minutes to type.

Now if you'll excuse me, there's a drooly potential future world leader over there in the Pack 'N Play who needs a teether and a big mommy hug, STAT.

My Little Supervisor

Now that Bug's a big eight month old guy he's continually finding new ways to amuse himself. This is good news for me in a way, since I can now accomplish a couple of necessary things while he's otherwise occupied, like empty the trash or sweep the floor. Sometimes the thing I'm trying to do becomes his primary source of entertainment.

The other day he had a marvelous time sitting in his walker watching me sweep. The broom is apparently an amazing thing to the mind of an eight month old. The fact that he hasn't seen one in use very often during his short time on the outside may have something to do with it. He had incredible fun following me around the kitchen and obliterating every neatly collected dust pile with the walker, as if to say, "Ya know you shouldn't leave these where a fellow like me can stumble upon them. See what can happen? Tsk! Tsk!"

After sweeping, I got down on my hands and knees with a Lysol wipe to clean up a few spots (we haven't mopped since before he was born - disgusting but true). As I worked my way across the floor I could hear him chattering away in his native baby language behind me and scooting around. Just as I was finishing up I felt a little hand patting my backside as if to say, "Nice job Mum, but you missed a spot. Snap to it, wouldya?"

Reasons Why Feeble Doesn't Post Often Anymore

In case you were wondering

Here they are, in no particular order:

• Hard to type with one hand.


• Hard to type with one hand on keyboard, one hand holding squirmy baby on lap.


• Hard to type with one hand on keyboard, one hand holding squirmy baby on lap while said squirmy baby keeps lunging at desk to grab a sticky note Mr. F wrote six months ago that says: "Have a good day today".


• Can't nurse and type at the same time.


• Lost too many brain cells watching Oobi on Noggin. (Why are hands with eyeballs so fascinating? Someone explain this to me).


• Baby has innate ability to sense, while sleeping, that Mommy might actually be trying to do something non-baby related and instantly awakens crying from nap.


• Hard to think while screechy baby monitor keeps kicking on to broadcast the sounds of crying and little feet (feet that should be napping, mind you) kicking the slats of the crib.


• Impossible to string words together to form sentences when sleep deprived after bad night of teething.


• Preferable to use the time to prepare and eat a "two-handed food" (i.e. an actual sandwich) over yet another untoasted whole-wheat mini bagel with nothing on it.


• Inevitable need to choose unhurried time on the toilet over blogging.


• When I actually do have a rare moment to post something, Blogger yet again is having database errors, server problems, traffic problems, network errors, fill-in-the-blank-trouble, and is beset by malicious gremlins and attack gnomes and can't publish my post.

I Hate to Do This

I hate to do this, but I might have to nuke all my old comments so I can ditch Haloscan.

At some point when I was living in some other dimension where babies never sleep and cry without ceasing, Haloscan pulled a dirty switcheroo on me and started inserting advertisments/links inside the comment and trackback windows. No Fair!

When I first noticed it, I was supremely irritated but had no time or strength left to do anything about it. I never would have imagined I'd ever lack the mental capacity to comment out a few lines of code and hit Publish, but there you have it. For a while there I was mentally wasted by a certain infant boy who shall remain nameless.

But now that said infant boy is now sleeping through the night, I find myself with all this time to do stuff again. Whoo-hoo. So I'm on the verge of dumping Haloscan commenting & trackbacks in favor of just using Blogger's improved commenting and "backlink" features. But I hate to nuke all the old comments, so many of them have been so appreciated by me - particularly the ones pertaining to Bug's birth.

I must ponder on this some more before I act. I've got the time now. Maybe I'll go through and copy the old comments to a file for posterity, but then I think to myself, "this is what you're going to do with your newfound free time?!"

Hm. Point.

Maybe I do need a new hobby?

Whiteout

I'm back... I think.

Just discovered that my blog was experiencing a bit of a whiteout during the last twenty four hours or so. I think it was the result of a network or server hiccup while my last post was uploading (?) Hard to say.

Ironically enough, that's probably the most interesting thing that's happened at this URL in a while :)

8 Months

To quote a popular song from the 80's: "You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?"

Bug is eight months old. For the past six weeks or so he's been on an actual, bona fide schedule, which still strikes me as a minor miracle. He has one tooth and another one about to come to the surface. He sits up pretty well on his own, though he still needs a pillow or something behind him for those few times when he loses his balance and flops backwards.

He's sleeping through the night (a major miracle). He doesn't need to take Zantac anymore (Praise God!) and is generally an easy going happy guy now.

He says DaDaDaDa and NieNieNie pretty well and emphatically at times, slapping his little knee or the high chair tray like Nikita Kruschev. He also says Ghhhuurrrrthh. I'm not sure what that means, but it's pretty impressive. He loves to eat (no surprise, considering his family gene pool) and is curious about everything.

Every day we go for a walk in the backyard and visit the plants and trees. When we get near a birch or beech tree branch, or a rhododendron bush he lunges in my arms and reaches out to touch the leaves - but gently. But he doesn't like the feel of grass on his feet. Not yet anyway.