time well spent

As we creep closer to the shortest days of the year, the time change effects linger as early risers crash,  sometimes even before a morsel of breakfast reaches their mouths. Afternoon naps for young girls still happen most days so that the pre-dinner hour does not turn into Meltdown City which has a surprising number of ways of manifesting itself. None are pleasant.

Soup is back on the menu as summer eating habits have been bid a gentle adieu, until we meet again.
Borrowing heavily from my friend Jacqueline's potluck soup offering last year, I made a delicious Sausage Vegetable soup a couple of weeks ago which will be made often. I have figured out that for many broth based soups, I start with a fat and sauteed aromatics such as onion, garlic, celery, carrots and thyme. If the meat needs to be cooked, I throw that in with the aromatics. If it just needs to be reheated, I throw it in later with the broth.
My fat choices varies with the soup. I buy picnic hams so I get a lot of ham fat to work with or chicken fat from roasting whole chickens or just their thighs or legs and later, bone broth from the bones or carcass in my crock pot anywhere from 12-24 hours depending on what else I have to get done. If I have no meat fat to work with, I use olive oil. Then I dump in any bone broth I have stored or I use bullion or ready-made bullion and add in a bay leaf along with any other vegetables I am adding to the soup. Sometimes before serving the soup, I use my immersion stick right in the soup pot to blend up a bit of the ingredients to give the soup a little heft. And I usually add in extra carrots and other veg that I can easily mash up for Kate's bowl.

Our lessons are going well, perhaps I can showcase some of their work in another post. We will be finishing up our fall sessions of soccer and swimming in the next few weeks.  I don't usually sign the kids up for anything again until March when most of the snow storms are over.

I have been shopping for Kate's birthday and Christmas already and am finished for the kids. I have some crafting for them I would like to do, which is tricky because we both live here and keep mostly the same hours. Right-o.
I try to enjoy the process and not worry about what I do not get done. Laura is my up and coming craft kid and enjoys making all sorts of things usually involving metric tons of any adhesive that will make her creations stick together. She has an eye for design that I sorely lack. I look forward to what she makes as she gets older even if we go broke buying tape, hot glue, staples and whatever else she uses.

If you're on Facebook, I have a page for this blog that I use to share links, photos, etc.

I'm also on Instagram under americanadiangirl. And I still loosely maintain my Tumblr blog, Whatever is Lovely.

And lastly, here are some new-to-us books I picked up this week. The Album of Horses replaces a copy we gave to one of our dear friends, a young horse enthusiast, earlier this year. And that copy of Rascal is a good reading copy to preserve our hardback from too much handling. I took a chance on the Big Red series, getting four of them without having even read one, but they were not very expensive and they fall into that vintage era of children's writing that we enjoy.

thoughts on abortion

I wrote this for my Facebook status today in light of the Planned Parenthood news and decided to post it here as well.

I'm just going say something that has long bothered Shane and I about the whole topic of abortion. When I was 22 weeks pregnant with Kate, we went in for yet another ultrasound which ended up being our fifth and final one. For 45 minutes straight, the technician explored her baby heart looking for abnormalities that would help the midwives and doctors involved know if she had Down Syndrome. They found nothing amiss this time, but a completely whole and perfectly functioning baby heart.
Before the ultrasound was finished, the technician asked me if I would like to see the rest of my baby. Yes, please. So I was given a final look at her little arms, legs and face until we met her face-to-face in a warm hospital room three weeks before Christmas.
After the ultrasound was completed, the results were sent to a pediatric cardiac doctor who was only a few rooms away. Minutes later, that doctor and two others met with us in a tiny room to tell us that they couldn't confirm DS and gave us three options to consider.
One was further genetic counseling which would involve an amniocentesis, the second was to do nothing and continue the pregnancy as normal and the third option was to abort her. The abortion, we were told, would have to take place within 2.5 weeks under Canadian law, or we could cross the border, they said, if we took longer.
We told them we were only interested in the second option and left the hospital. To have doctors who were so diligent in their care of our baby's health also be so diligent to help us kill our baby girl forever imprinted on our minds the divided or schizophrenic mind of these doctors who could care for the unborn as long as the mother wanted the baby, but would be so willing so kill the unborn if the mother no longer wanted the baby. It all hinged on what the mother thought of the baby. If it was wanted, it was a baby to be celebrated, if it was unwanted it was a fetus to get rid of. Of course, as it has been pointed out, a fetus is just another name for a young one, an offspring.
We have always understood that those who wish for women to be able to continue to kill their unborn babies are those who insist on holding at least two inconsistent ideas in their mind. 1) Babies are not babies unless the mother says they are and  2) Science is everything unless you are talking about the formation of babies.
Nobody is saying that every mother can be a mother to her birthed baby. Life is hard, sometimes you have to get help.
By the time Kate was 48 hours old, she had been transferred by ambulance through snow-packed roads to the children's hospital where she was to spend the next three weeks of her life drinking milk, gaining weight and getting strong enough to nurse and drink milk from a bottle. She spent most of those three weeks in a crib room with three other infants who all had very serious and heart-breaking medical conditions.
One of them was a baby boy flown in from Baffin Island who had many reasons to need hospital care. He was already in the foster care system and the nurses and doctors gave him the same wonderful care Kate was receiving. He was smiling and drinking his milk and in the best place he could possibly be.
For those who think that abortion is the best answer for some mothers and their babies, they are wrong. There are many families who are willing to take these babies in and be the parents that the mother could not be. We have several families in our small circle of friends and acquaintances here in Ontario who currently have such babies and children in their care. We also have friends who have gone out of their way to adopt special needs babies. I am humbled by those friends.
Abortion does not just kill a baby, it kills a part of us. It closes down our minds and hearts to what else could be done to help. It is not easy to care for an unwell baby. It is not easy to watch a baby need medical help. It is not easy to see a baby die in spite of a doctor's expert care.
But that is this life and no one can shield us from any and all suffering. I write this from a mother's heart who was asked to be part of an abortion protest in the eighth grade along with classmates. I continue to protest for many reasons, one of which is because I've been in that room and have looked in the face of doctors who thought they were helping. Killing the unborn never helps.

surrounded by love

I posted this comment of my personal Facebook page very early this morning:

"Just got my quarterly reminder yesterday from someone close to us that other "Down's kids are talking, singing and dancing. You need to be doing more for Kate." 
There were other remarks too. I always take my medicine like a good girl and usually rally to point out some new skill she has learned. It always falls on deaf ears."

Many kind friends have poured out their kindness and love to our family in encouraging comments.
Before lunch, I took this photo of Kate and posted it just a few minutes ago with these words:

"In light of my previous post, thank you to all of you. xo"

housekeeping notes

The first picture is from this morning, the last is from later this afternoon as the sun was hastening to go down before it's lengthening curfew which is currently around half past four.

In other news, I changed the name of my Facebook page this morning to match the name of this blog instead of my Tumblr blog Whatever Is Lovely. If you're on Facebook and want to follow me there, this is the link or find the link in my right sidebar.

Now I'm off to stash my dirty dishes out of sight in a box that later will wash and dry them for me. Yes, I'm talking about my new automatic dishwasher. After telling Shane for the last two plus years I didn't really care about replacing our broken dishwasher, suddenly this past fall I cared. A lot.
So last Friday, we headed off to get one which Shane promptly spent hours installing until it was ready later that evening. It is quite nice to pop them in dirty and then pop them out clean. Shane wonders what I will do with all the extra time I now have at my disposal. One can only imagine!

forming souls

"Thus when we teach our youngest children by means of rhymes and songs, we do not so merely because rhymes and songs are effective mnemonic devices. We do so because we wish to form their souls by memory: we wish to bring them up as rememberers, as persons, born, as Caldecott points out, in certain localities, among certain people, who bear a certain history, and who claim our love and loyalty." ~ Anthony Esolen, writing in the Foreward to Beauty in the Word by Stratford Caldecott.

Cindy announced a book study through Beauty in the Word, starting last week and for once, thanks to Amazon Canada(amazon.ca), I could get the book at a great price and in time to participate. (And with thanks to my in-laws for birthday money they sent, I did not have to justify buying myself more books. They were basically a gift. Yep.)
Stratford Caldecott's books have been on my wish list for a couple of years now, so this seemed like a great time to dig in, with Cindy at the helm.
I chose this quote from the Foreward because as I read it last night, I was glad to hear someone else say what others around me are saying too. I want to our children to know their people's history and culture and to know that they belong to a certain group of people. We are part of Western civilization and it has many aspects worth conserving and remembering.
Recently I watched Wesley Callihan give a tour of his personal library, shelf by shelf. (I posted a link to it on March 22 on my new Facebook page, more details down below.)
His library is organized chronologically from ancient/ classical up through the early church writers, through the Middle Ages and on into the Reformation and Modern era. They are books that tell the story of Western/Christian civilization. It is a past worth remembering.

On another note, I wanted to announce that back at the end of Feburary, I created a Facebook page to be a companion to both this blog and my Tumblr blog, Whatever is Lovely.  Over the years since Facebook came into existence, I have pondered whether to create a page for Prone to Wander on Facebook.  But wanting to keep some order and control over the content-management prevented me from doing so. Two years ago, not very happy with Pinterest, but liking the visual array it presented, I started a Tumblr blog to create a place where I could post pleasant photos and images. Along the way, I have somehow collected a couple hundred followers who can see what I post on Whatever is Lovely. But I really only post with me in mind. And you, if you enjoy beautiful images and photos.
So I finally happened to consider that perhaps if I started a Facebook page as a companion to my Tumblr blog, it could also serve as a way of sharing items similar to what you would find on here and still make me happy with social media managing the content.
So to summarize, my announcement is that I have created a Facebook page called Whatever is Lovely and you are invited to go check it out and like it. And I think that the link should work even if you don't have a Facebook account. I have tested it, but please let me know if it works for you. That is all.

Kate's exciting morning of progress

From my Facebook update earlier this morning:

Very very excited that Kate just blew into her little horn/recorder three different times producing a sound!! Two months ago she couldn't even organize her mouth to blow, let alone produce a sound! Annnddd, she is biting properly up and down on her chewy tube instead of one big chomp and fixing. I feel like we might just be turning a corner. Video to follow.

and then a few minutes later I posted this video update:

Just a short clip to hear Kate blowing into her little horn actually producing a sound this morning. She had already made it toot three different times before I got the camera and shot this clip, so her patience was probably running short with the activity. We tried blowing bubbles after this but she hasn't figured that out yet.

And on top of all this progress, she has been showing signs of being ready to potty-train, so I have been setting the timer for around 15 minute increments to put her on.  After a few misses this morning, where she had just gone in her diaper despite me adjusting the timer to meet her frequency, we just now put her on and she went "on-demand" for the first time ever.  She seemed to know what she should be doing, so time will tell if she really is ready or needs more time to figure this out.  Just so very excited to see some progress in areas where I had begun to despair.  Thank you for praying and all the kind concern that you all have expressed to me here and in person. We know she is loved and cared for by many, many people.

lately

Some of my closest friends are not on Facebook so I thought I would share some of my recent posts from there on here as well as a video and photos of Kate from this morning, entitled Kate the Hairdresser.  :)

A Facebook update from Friday afternoon:

Seth and I were finishing up our All About Spelling Lesson which has brightly colored phonogram magnetic tiles when Laura came down from her nap and snuggled in my lap while we continued to work. After watching Seth and I manipulate the letter tiles for the lesson work, she looked very sweetly up at me and said, "When I grow up...(and at this point I was totally convinced that she was going to say, "I'm going to learn with this stuff too" or something similar since she has done that before, but no, she had something different in mind this time, very different)...I'm going to have bumps on my face like you, Mama!" Oh, the honesty and innocence of children! My face fell and I said fervently, "I hope not, Laura, I hope not." On the bright side, I am thankful that she overlooks my ongoing beauty blemishes and loves me nonetheless.

Another one from Satuday afternoon:

Oh dear, it was one those parenting moments where you wish you could disappear into the floor. Before I could stop her, Kate leaned over from our Michael's shopping cart and reached into an elderly woman's purse nestled in her cart. I instantly grabbed Kate's hand back, scolded her and apologized profusely to the non-smiling lady who was now carefully and firmly zipping her handbag closed. I don't think she ever even looked at Kate to see who she was dealing with. LOL

Daddy's photo

Fun in the snow, Seth and Laura