The Wine-Dark Sea

I looked up and Anthony, who had been calmly eating his tortilla while seated in the yellow chair, had somehow scaled the table. See how proud he is?

I guess every family has to have one. I’ve finally met mine. Though I do wonder how much birth order has to do with it. Bella might have been as much of a climber and as into things as Anthony is but since she was my only one when she was this age, I was able to keep my eye on her at all times.

A short time later and he was climbing this ladder! Oh, baby boy! He was not so successful getting down and so hasn’t attempted it again.

Peek-a-boo!

See, no fear! He sees the others climbing and swinging and doesn’t see why he shouldn’t too.

This is why his face and head are constantly covered in bruises and scrapes.

The wagon only contained him for a little while. Then he figured out how to climb down. Of course.

All tired out. I put him down in the chair when he fell asleep in my arms right before we were heading out to the store. Bella adorned him with some of her fabric bits.

Eating pancakes with Bella in our Sunday after-Mass ritual. It was a fine day so the kids were dining al fresco.

Blowing raspberries with pizza all over his face.

A rare sight: all four of my gang playing happily together in the sandbox.

Ben and Bella, but mostly Ben running and running. And Anthony roaming back and forth between my lap and the bench where Sophie is sitting (where the food was).

I told you I was on a video kick.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Anthony’s baptism but we were too busy for me to bake a cake so we decided to postpone the celebration to today. (Bella noted that we delayed his birthday celebration by a day too. Poor Anthony, I resolve to do better next year.) Despite a rough night, I managed to bake a chocolate cake (chock full of beets and ground almonds to give it an extra nutrition punch for my picky eaters)this afternoon and so the party was on. After dinner we lit Anthony’s baptismal candle, renewed our baptismal vows, and then sang the Regina Caeli, Sophie and Bella chiming in on both the “I dos” and the Marian hymn. Then we ate cake, Anthony diving in with gusto and the other kids not far behind.

Although he didn’t join in the singing with the rest of us, later Ben was singing on the changing table: “Alleluia, Queen of Heaven be joyful, Alleluia. People of Heaven, be joyful, alleluia.” 

What a joyful celebration to fall within the Easter season!

This was just so beautiful, I just had to share.

My Lord, God,
You have led me by a long, dark path,
Rocky and hard.
Often my strength threatened to fail me.
I almost lost all hope of seeing the light.
But when my heart grew numb with deepest grief,
A clear star rose for me.
Steadfast it guided me- I followed,
At first reluctant, but more confidently later.

At last I stood at Church’s gate.
It opened. I sought admission.
From your priest’s mouth Your blessing greets me.
Within me stars are strung like pearls.
Red blossom stars show me the path to You.
They wait for you at Holy Night.
But your goodness
Allows them to illuminate my path to You.
They lead me on.
The secret which I had to keep in hiding
Deep in my heart,
Now I can shout it out:
I believe-I profess!
The priest accompanies me to the altar:
I bend my face-
Holy water flows over my head.

Lord, is it possible that someone who is past
Midlife can be reborn (Jn 3,4)?
You said so, and for me it was fulfilled,
A long life’s burden of guilt and suffering
Fell away from me.
Erect I receive the white cloak,
Which they place round my shoulders,
Radiant image of purity!
In my hand I hold a candle.
Its flame makes known
That deep within me glows your holy life.

My heart has become your manger,
Awaiting you,
But not for long!
Maria, your mother and also mine
Has given me her name.
At midnight she will place her newborn child
Into my heart.

Ah, no one’s heart can fathom,
What you’ve in store for those who love you (1Cor 2,9).
Now you are mine, and I won’t let you go.
Wherever my life’s road may lead,
You are with me.
Nothing can ever part me from your love (Rm 8,39).

via Daily Gospel Online
Tuesday of the Second week of Easter
Commentary of the day
Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross [Edith Stein] (1891-1942), Carmelite, martyr, co-patron of Europe
Poem: « Heilige Nacht » (trans.©Suzanne Batzdorff)

Please notice the sweet boys and ignore the goofy hat. I much prefer my broad brimmed sunhat but with Anthony in the Ergo, I figured he wouldn’t want the brim poking into his face. So the floppy hat it was, which has since lost whatever semblance of shape it once had.

Dom had Monday off and when I learned that the weather would be warm and sunny I had a yearning to go to one of my favorite places: World’s End. So we packed up the kids and some snacks and headed out. A half hour drive and we were there. The name is magic and so is the place: a great big hill on a promontory overlooking the ocean. Trees and wild places. A high grassy meadow. Birds and flowers and butterflies. And in the distance the Boston skyline. So many of my favorite things. There is another part of the park, you cross a causeway and there is a little island with another hill. We’ve never made it that far with our small gang. But someday…. someday when they are a bit older and have more endurance….

Still, there was magic enough. We spotted a red-wing blackbird. And swallows. We identified a few trees. We saw violets and dandelions and picked up pinecones and acorns. Bella collected a branch from a birch tree and one from a larch. We saw a red-tailed hawk on the ground and got so close before it flew off to the top of a nearby tree.

Red-tailed hawk taking off.

Poor Sophie wasn’t feeling so good and neither was Anthony. By the end of the day it was apparent that all the kids have colds. Sophie and Ben were both up coughing last night. But we soldiered on and even though Sophie rode in the stroller and insisted it was too hot, I think even she enjoyed the beauty once we were at the top of the hill. She sat on the bench while the others ran around. But once she had some peanut butter crackers in her belly she perked up a bit.

I carried Anthony on my back. The Ergo is well balanced enough I didn’t feel it on my shoulders or back but, oh, my legs! He got cranky at one point and started pulling on my hair and clawing at my hat. Then fell asleep. Then woke up when we stopped, ate massive quantities of crackers, bread and pizza crusts. Then fell asleep almost immediately. Ben ran and ran and ran. And walked all the way back to the car, sometimes holding my hand. Oh how sweet it was to be walking with my boys, one on my back and the other by my side!

Finally getting around to uploading a bunch of videos off my camera.

I seem to go through phases of taking lots of video and then months will pass when I take nothing at all. Then suddenly I’ll have those thoughts you don’t like to entertain but I sometimes find myself stuck on this morbid groove where I imagine something terrible happening and how I wouldn’t be able to remember what someone’s voice sounded like and oh why didn’t I have a video. Or else I just go back and watch old videos of Bella and think of how shoddy my memory is and I’d forgotten what she was like at that age and why don’t I have more videos of Ben and Sophie at that age. So out comes the camera and I take a bunch of videos. So here I am in the midst of a video binge and you, dear blog readers, get to be the beneficiaries.

1. Easter Morning

Ben woke up early on Easter morning and played with the toys while he waited for his sisters to rise. All the duckies and chickies and bunnies

It’s funny because when I watch this video and others I hear how much like a two-year-old he sounds. But when I speak with him face to face I really don’t get that. All I hear is the meaning behind his words or else I’m straining to get at that meaning. It’s only with the video that I hear how he must sound to other people.

Oh and I love the bit where I look down and Anthony is biting the table.

2. Happy Easter from the Bettinelli children.

3. Anthony and the big stick.

Bella has been pretending this stick is a processional cross and Sophie and Ben have been following suit. Anthony likes to imitate the big kids and carry it around.

4. Sophie Reads to Ben

I was cleaning up in the living room the other day when I noticed my two middle children snuggled together in the chair. Sophie was doing her own version of Mo Willem’s Amanda and Her Alligator. Sophie never feels bound to stick to the text or even the basic storyline. I just love watching the two of them being so happy spending time together. I love watching how much they love each other and how sweet and funny they are. And how often they all have their noses stuck in books.

5. A Tale of Two Camels

When Sophie realized I was recording her, the story hour with Ben was suddenly over. She ran over and began to tell me a story about the two camels, whose names are Rose and Lima. (The names are permanent, no matter what the game the camels are always Rose and Lima just as the ostriches are Greydial and Pinkdial and the elephants are Mom and Dad and the donkeys are Teresa and Little Catherine, the duck is Lucy and the horses are Sly and Slyer.)

When I first began to pray the Liturgy of the Hours Easter and Christmas were a revelation. I never before knew that each of these feasts was not a single day but an octave, a celebration that is so huge and earth-shattering that it takes a full week to properly celebrate. This is most clear when you pray Morning and Evening Prayer during the octave. For the full eight days you pray Morning and Evening Prayer for Sunday Week I. Every day the same psalms, the same antiphons. It is kind of like the movie Groundhog Day, you just keep repeating the same thing over and over. The first year or two of praying the Liturgy of the Hours it was just stunning to be able to enter so deeply into the Easter joy, not to have to feel like it was all packed away Easter Monday but to know that Easter just kept on going and going and going.

But I must confess that over time the newness wore off and in the past few years I began to almost dread the octave. The same prayers over and over. How dull. How tedious. Sigh.

I am so grateful to the Divine Office podcast for bringing the newness back to my experience of the Liturgy. On Easter morning I plugged my iPhone into the iHome speakers in my kitchen and hit play and then my heart soared. They were chanting the psalms! Before I even got to the end I was planning to play it again. I just have to listen to this again! All those glorious alleluias! And then I remembered: I do get to listen to it again! Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. A full eight days of it!

And still today I am on that high. It hasn’t grown old. It’s just as wonderful today as it was on the first day. I still want to play each hour again and again. The only difference is now I’m starting to really sing along: The splendor of Christ risen from the dead has shown on the people redeemed by his blood, alleluia.

Jesus said: Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to set out for Galilee; there they will see me, alleluia.

And Oh! the chanted Benedictus and Magnificat and the Te Deum at the end of the Office of Readings! If you haven’t heard it yet, I beg you to go to their website and listen to Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer and the Office of Readings now before the Octave is over. This just shouldn’t be missed. It will make you want to pray the Liturgy of the Hours with the Church.

The children are all catching the Easter fever too. Ben hears the prayers begin and runs into the kitchen to tell me that he loves it. I later hear him chanting alleluias as he plays in the living room. The girls sing alleluias too. We have all become alleluia people. And this is how it is meant to be. The resurrection changes everything. It brings our dead souls to life and we can’t help but sing out our joy.

Tonight Ben relived with me again the Easter vigil, recalling the candles shining in the darkness. He asked me why it was dark and told me how much he loved it when Father Currie brought the candle in. Tonight I just had to listen to the Exsultet one more time:

Now wasn’t that simply heaven on earth? Oh it really was hearing it while in a church lit up only by candle light, warmed by the glow of my children’s faces.

A very happy Easter to you all. Christ is Risen! He is truly, truly risen! Alleluia!

I’ve begun reading Rumer Godden’s doll story, Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, to Sophie and Bella. The first chapter absolutely captivated them and immediately afterwards I noticed Sophie changing the way she played with her baby doll. She was pretending the doll was glass and that she had to be very careful with it. This was directly from the book; but it was her attempt to begin to take in the new story and make it her own.

Anthony is teething and had had a couple of really terrible nights with hours of screaming in the early morning hours. During one of those screaming bouts I handed him off to my heroic sister but then still couldn’t fall asleep. So I had a chance to lie awake and ponder this and other of Godden’s doll stories, especially The Story of Holly and Ivy, which I suppose we must have read to Bella a dozen times or more.

There is something truly wonderful about The Story of Holly and Ivy, the way the story of the doll parallels the story of the little orphan girl. Both long for a home, for someone to love and mother them, though neither identifies her desire specifically as a mother. Ivy declares that she is going to find “my grandmother” and Holly yearns for a little girl, “My Christmas girl”. I think Godden has really hit on something, how a doll is a perfect stand in for a child, how a child is able to project her inner needs onto the doll and in lavishing affection and attention on her doll is able to express her own yearnings. More, Godden’s dolls also express a child’s frustration with her own helplessness. A doll cannot move herself, cannot even express her desires in words. All she can do is wish. A child, too, is severely limited in her autonomy. An infant is just like one of Godden’s dolls: she cannot move independently, she cannot speak. All she can do is wish that some caring person will guess what it is that she needs: food, sleep, a change of scenery, a change of clothing. She is completely at the mercy of the all-powerful adults in her life. This dynamic of the helpless dolls wishing for a girl to understand them and meet their unspoken needs is even more apparent in Miss Happiness and Miss Flower when the two Japanese dolls are gifted to two girls, one of whom, Nona, is a sympathetic girl who tries to understand the dolls’ needs and the other, Belinda, who is careless and thoughtless and doesn’t understand them at all.

Digging deeper, as one is wont to do when sleepless at 2 am, it occurs to me that Godden’s dolls represent more generally the human condition. Spiritually we are all like Godden’s dolls and like her orphan children, for all Christians have been adopted into God’s family. All of us have a longing for home and for a sense of belonging. We feel homesick because we all know in our deepest core that our true home is not to be found in this world. Moreover, we are all helpless to express the truest longings of our soul—as the letter to the Romans reminds us, “we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.” We are all like the little dolls wishing to be heard by a loving person who will understand what it is that we need, even if we ourselves are unable to articulate our deepest desires. And all of us are spiritually as helpless as infants. We cannot feed ourselves the food we truly need but our Heavenly Father has given us Mother Church who feeds us the Bread from Heaven. We cannot change our soiled garments when we have sullied them with sin. Instead we rely on Holy mother Church to change our filthy garments for fresh ones in the sacrament of Reconciliation.

I thought it was interesting that the first thing Nona, who like Godden herself was born in India and feels out of place in cold, dreary England, does for the Japanese dolls is to give them a ritual to express their wishes and her own wishes for a home, for belonging, for family. She writes these wishes on little scraps of paper and ties them to a tree. She is learning how to pray. Nona’s own sense of displacement isn’t enough; but when she sense’s the displacement the dolls feel then she yearns to help them. She determines to build them a proper Japanese dollhouse, to make them a home. In the process of learning how to build the house she must learn to rely on the helpfulness of others, of the bookstore owner who lends her books about Japan and on her cousin who has the necessary woodworking skills. In fact, her project draws in everyone in the family except for Belinda. As Nona works to make the dolls a place where they will feel welcome, she begins to create a place for herself as well.

Front Door by Bella. This picture is hanging up in the hall. Bella put it there.

Bella says she wants to be an artist and a scientist. I can see her blossoming in both realms. She loves making her own art and can spend hours studying art in various picture books. She notices all sorts of details and has a wonderful degree of visual literacy. She is a very good observer of nature as well and is always asking questions and yearning to know more. She’s also been saying that she hears God’s call for her life and it is to be a religious sister. (Though in the past she’s also told be that she’s heard God telling her she is to be a mommy.) Most recently she told me that while she was at Mass with Dom on Holy Thursday she heard God speaking and he told her she will be a religious sister. When she says these things we accept them and at the same time always gently affirm that she has plenty of time to discern God’s calling for her and that often we hear different calls at different times. We always tell her that it will make us very happy whatever she ends up doing. If she is a religious sister we will be very happy, if she is a mommy we will be happy. Most of all, I say,  we want her to listen to God and to love him and to serve him in whatever she does. I love watching her ponder the possibilities with all the gravity of a five year-old.

Horse by Bella—This one is hanging on our bathroom door.

Monday was beautiful, sunny and clear. The kids were all outside by nine thirty and spent most of the day going in and out. At one point I went out in the back yard and Bella told me that she heard a cardinal singing. I heard a bird but I couldn’t identify the sound as a cardinal. I’d probably have guessed robin. I’m trying to learn bird calls but I’m not all that good. So I tried to look around and see if I could spot the bird that was singing. Sure enough there was a brilliant splash of red in the very top branches of the tree next door that was just beginning to turn a hazy green. There was Bella’s cardinal. I pointed it out to her and she grinned when she spotted it. She continued to scan about and spotted a grackle and pointed to it. Later she told me that it sounded like the cardinal and the grackle were having a conversation.

Pig by Bella. This one is hanging on Auntie Tree’s bedroom door.

On Wednesday we spotted a hawk circling above our house when we came home from the library. It called over and over again, first circling low and then soaring high. Bella said she’d never seen a bird fly so high. She also said the call sounded very much like a crow.

Paper Doll by Bella. She designed and executed this project all on her own. I was so impressed.

Wednesday morning I was very tired. Anthony was screaming half the night and I only got about four hours of sleep and those were interrupted by Sophie needing to be tucked in. When I got up at 6 I told Bella Sophie and Ben I was very, very tired and asked for them to pray for me so that today I would be able to be patient with everything. Bella sweetly volunteered that since I was so tired I didn’t have to read her her special books at naptime today but could instead lie down and take a nap. She said it would be a general rule that when I was tired from having a hard night I didn’t have to read to her. Her special afternoon read alouds are something she greatly treasures and looks forward to so this was an amazing act of generosity. I would normally really try to give her that time even if I am very tired so I was grateful not to feel conflicted but to retire to my room with Anthony and take an afternoon nap.

Bella with her paper doll. You can see that it’s almost life size. The red pieces down the sides are lace, Bella says. They have red hearts stenciled on them.

Also on Wednesday we went to the library. Bella went in costume. She had put her bright floral pattern dolly sling over her head as a wimple and then a bright orange scarf as a veil. She had a colorful print apron around her waist with a blue plastic rosary tucked into the band. She was a nun. It was so cute but I know no one but me would have guessed nun; but Sophie really didn’t want her to wear the outfit into the library. I’m not sure why.

Paper Doll back side so that you can see the green hair.

Bella’s art has really taken a huge leap forward of late. She really does try so hard to observe carefully and then to reproduce what she observes. Her picture of our front door includes the knob and the deadbolt, the peephole, the mail slot, the bolts that hold on the knocker. When she made her giant paper doll she got out her shoes and put them on the table to look at as she drew the tiny bows for the doll’s shoes. She has an eye for detail and also a courage to go ahead and draw even when she does know that the results fall short of her vision.

Paper Doll. Detail of shoes with bows.

Bella has also decided to be a missionary and to evangelize our neighborhood. Yesterday she made paper rosaries and she wanted to hand them out to people. Then she wanted me to write out the words to the Hail Mary so she could hand that out as well so people could learn about Mary. But she didn’t go so far as to knock on any doors. I think she was just going to wait until someone came by and no one ever did.

Paper Doll. Detail of face and necklace.

I had this post all formatted and then tried to post it and then it somehow reverted to a previous version and I had to go back and add in all the pictures and captions and by the time I was done with that I was too tired to reformat as well. And I think I lost some of my text as well; but again, too tired. So just go read some better quick takes from Jen over at Conversion Diary. Hers are very nicely formatted. With scorpions.

Ben the early bird gets first crack at the toys.

A truck!

Ben plays with the pinwheels while Anthony looks on.

The Easter chicks and bunnies were gifts from family several Easters ago. I store them away at the end of Easter so they are new every year.

I bought these books a while back and now seemed to be a good time to give them. Bella is finally interested in paying attention to details as she colors and not just scribbling over the page. These books are designed so that the act of coloring the beautiful detailed images is a part of the learning experience, engaging the imagination and preparing the ground for a deeper, more intellectual understanding later. (Books available from Thomas More College of Liberal Arts)

Blurry Bella puts on her photograph face.

True to form, Bella dove into the books before the candy or toys.

Ben took “his” new dump truck out to the sand box before he ate breakfast. (I told the kids the sand toys are for everyone but the fact is that Ben has taken primary ownership. Sophie is content to let him take over the truck while she plays with the stuffed animals. Meanwhile Bella has claimed the books.)

Bella eats a chocolate bunny.

Anthony ate the entire chocolate cross!

Eventually Ben did eat breakfast and then had some chocolate. He didn’t eat much the rest of the day though. Poor overtired and overstimulated guy.

My boys.

Who doesn’t love chocolate?

I love the double toddler squat.

Smiling Sophie eats her chocolate cross

She looks a little fierce here.