The Week in review, Sept 3rd through Sept 20, 2010

Wow...where to begin.

May be easier to just list the things that occurred.

Well, seen here in the video below, he grabbed my camera...and then licked it. :-)

He learned how to open his hands to grab/grasp for things. He grabs at everything he can, especially things that light up.

He gave me another hickey.

The nursing strike has ended!

He met his paternal grandparents, and his Aunt and cousin.

He met his third cousins, aka his godparents.

He finally got a pair of bitching sun glasses.

He stands, assisted, all the time.

He pulls for Chris's goat-tee all the time and yanks his glasses off.

He rolls and rolls and rolls....over and over and over, and cries when furniture gets in his way.

Everything he comes into contact with goes into his mouth.

He actively tries to grab for his bottle and hold it, even though he really can't do it well. When I take it away, he stares at it and cries, and reaches for it.

We can see and feel two bottom teeth on the verge of cutting through. We're giving him Hyland's Teething Tablets and he loves them. When he sees the tablet in my hand, he calms down and opens his mouth for me to insert!

He crawled! Well it was 'one' crawl, then he gave up and rolled the rest of the way.

He got a Bumbo but he's too young and weak for it. He can tolerate maybe 5 minutes a day in it, then he slouches over. But it's good practice and he'll enjoy it more later.

He saw his Dr a week ago, he weighed in at 12 lb 13 oz and is 26 inches long. He's in the 75% percentile in length, which is above average (For a 4 month old, not a 6 month old) but still in the 3rd percentile for weight for his real age, not adjusted. I'm sure he's 13 lb by now. He sees the Dr again in a week for vaccinations.

He uses the "big boy" stroller now, don't really put the car seat in the stroller anymore, it's too heavy for me to lift.

He kind of had a little cold, but not really. He never got a fever, but he had a cough and some sneezes. He felt kind of cruddy and napped on me for over 6 hours on Saturday, poor little sweet boy. He was a trooper though, he never really cried about it. LOL.

His hair is growing back like a weed! And it's BLOND, almost white in the sun! And, as of this week, his eyes are green!

He smiles all the time and laughs at least twice a day. He also reaches for the dogs, who now, kind of are interested in him.

He does his own tummy time, by rolling over and staying on his tummy for up to 10 minutes, lifting his head the entire time.

We noticed that when he's concentrating hard on something....he sticks his bottom lip out, and grunts. LOL...it's too funny. He did this when he discovered his feet over the weekend!

He snores....

He took his first shower! (Duh....not alone! LOL!)

Last but not least, he was baptized last weekend at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Franklin, Ohio. We had 26 carbon based life forms in our 1,000 sq ft house for the after-party. He did great during the ceremony, stared into the Priest's eyes and seemed mesmerized. He did great with the water dunk and the oil anointing, but cried when the oil seeped into his eyes.

Next week, my darling angel will be six months old....yikes!

Here the poor boy has a 'panty' on his head...

Bumbo!

What baby has quadriceps?

Farmer Willie!

Poor teething boy...

Haufbrauhaus with Grand-Pappy!

Skyline of Cincinnati, on the Ohio River

Hey there Grammy!

New blanket from his Great Aunt Hazel

Standing proud!

Feet? What are feet? Are they mine?

I'm too cool for words...

I love this book! To teethe on!

Wow....a pooch!

Cool satin Baptism Bib from Grandma!

My buddy Corinne

Me and Cal! He's still bigger than me!

Did NOT like the oil in his eye!

Dip!

Don and Cheryl, the godparents from PA

Grammy, Aunt Shanan and Cousin Raine

Homemade Red Velvet Cheesecake being cut, and dark chocolate cake with homemade butter cream.

Pat and Rich drove in from PA

The Storm Men

My thoughts on Church....

This blog entry has NOTHING to do with faith. It has to do solely with the actual, physical Church, the building itself and the experience one got in the building, not the religion in general.

I know more about religion than almost any other person I know. Why? Because I was very, very religious growing up and as a young adult. For reasons unknown to everyone including those who forced this upon me....I was raised Catholic....but attended a Lutheran school for ten years...ten formative years.

For those of you who don't know jack about the reformation it was started by a little known German monk dude named Martin LUTHER(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_luther)...hence the Lutheran Church...if any break-a-way Church is anti-Catholic, you can pretty much bet that the Lutherans are at the top of that list.

So I attended Lutheran school by day and Catholic Church on some weekends....Catechism for Communion was fun. I never understood why the Catholics hated the Protestants and why the Protestants hated the Catholics...I mean yeah, there was some selling of indulgences and stuff...but I was just a tad confused growing up.

Let me tell you a little something about my Catholic Church I attended growing up, Holy Family, in North Miami, Florida. (http://www.holyfamilynorthmiami.com/) You'll notice from the picture it looks like a rolled up receipt. That place was round, round and HUGE....very huge. The acoustics were great! You could hear every whimper from every baby, every second of every mass. The only thing I liked was the pipe organ. I still dig me a pipe organ.

Our Priests, never spoke good English. There were always hundreds of babies there, crying, so even if they did speak English I never heard a word they said. The only person who forced me to go was Mema...and Mema told me, and I believed her, that there was "no bathroom" in Church.

NEVER tell someone with a hyperactive bladder that there is no bathroom! I of course spent every second of Mass each time looking from my seat in the painful pew for a bathroom. I never did find it. I was not, of course, allowed to get up and look for it. I'm sure it existed...somewhere...somewhere in that void on that holy ground there had to be a bathroom!

So I equate Church with the pain of a full bladder and the fear of wetting ones self. Fun huh?

Our service was never short. It was long...over an hour. Mema liked to get there early too. I had to pee before the processional even started!

As a young Catholic, you sit, stand, and kneel and more importantly watch on as everyone gets up, stands in line, and gets their very own communion wafer. You wonder what it tastes like, and when you'll get to sample some. You attend classes to prepare for eating said wafer. Finally the day comes....you get up to the front of the line and the Monseigneur offers you the body of Christ and it tastes like.....stale puffed wheat...it also sticks to the roof of your mouth. You're not supposed to chew it, or dig at it once it's stuck with your finger, so it lingers...stuck....for a pretty good period of time.

Despite all that, it's still fun. You're finally a real member of the Church. You're practically an adult! So you almost look forward to sitting with a full bladder while babies scream and Priests from the eastern block talk about the same stuff every week....until your Mema tells you another tall-tale...."You can't have communion if you missed the prior week of Church."

This is bogus and there was nothing I could do. As neither Mema nor I had a car, we had to rely on others to drive us to Church...and others NEVER drove us two Sundays in a row! SO....I never got Communion again until twenty six years later....after Mema was dead and I actually at my own will entered a different Catholic Church. Guess what? I did not implode! Nor did I spontaneously combust...nor did I burst into flames....nor did the wafer poison my throat.

So now when I think of Church, I think of full bladders and starvation! Oh, and back pain. Why? Because I have mild scoliosis. Did anyone in my family tell me? NO! LOL! I thought it was normal to gimp around with a bent and bruised spine my entire life. Spending every week in my Lutheran Church at school, seated in wooden pews and then what seemed like every 'other' Sunday at Catholic Church did a number on my spine. All that wood rubbing up against me for years and years meant I had a perpetual cut and bruised spine. Don't get me started on my knees! YES, what 12 yr old has bad knees? Well, me.

I'm a klutz. I bang my knees, often! One in particular, my right, gets banged badly, every two years or so. Four years ago I managed to crack the darn thing. That was fun. I wore a knee brace for years in my 20s...kneeling was not an option. Okay so now Church equals full bladders, starvation, back bruising and knees that pop so loud when I kneel even the Priest who speaks no English stops yapping and the babies stop crying.

Then there is the boredom. Here's how my Church went....pipe organ, my favorite part, processional, always made the hairs on my arms stand up...song, some muttering in a foreign tongue, a reading from the book of who knows because all I hear is the baby behind me screaming at the top of it's heathen lungs, some more talk by the Priest who I couldn't hear, another song that I couldn't sing but thankfully the choir could, step class...and then...the story of Communion.

It was the same story every week, obviously, it'd not changed in 2000 years. It took 30 minutes to tell. A wafer would be held up to the sky light over the alter, a bell would be rung by a alter boy, then the blood of Christ would get held up, another bell...then some stinky incense would be released thus gassing us all nearly to death. Then 2000 people who I know for a FACT did not attend the Mass the week prior got up and took their Communion while I was forced to kneel on bad knees and NOT take the Communion I worked so hard to earn because the week prior our ride fell through!

All I would think about was a toilet...which was easy to do as our Church was so plain. See, Church's are supposed to be beautiful, right? Ours was......plain...........minimalist..........it was decorated by Ikea I think. Red carpet...tan walls....and the gorgeous stained glass windows? Um no. These were solid colored stained glass cubes scatted throughout the circular building. The colors were red, blue or green, and since there were no walls really they were just...there...in no particular order. I always wanted to sit in the front but Mema liked the back. The back was good because I could stake out a path to a potential albeit fictitious bathroom that way but the front would have a nicer and different view of the skylight over the alter, and closer to the choir. But no, never happened.

Fast forward many years. Ohio is a very Catholic state. They say that most people in SW Ohio are Catholic, yet I'm surrounded by Protestant Churches. I did some research and found a Catholic Church in my town, my very small town. It was founded in the mid 1800's...so, it's old! It's older than dirt! Unlike the rolled up receipt, this one looks traditional, with dark brown brick and real stained glass windows.

For reasons I won't mention, I made a promise that I'd attend Church one Sunday if something 'good' was done for me, which it was, so I went.

First I was struck by its size. It's tiny! Very tiny! I'd never been in such a small Church before. I thought all Catholic Churches were gigantic....nope! Second, it was gorgeous! The walls inside were a subtle gray and there were beautiful stained glass windows, mostly blue in color, with events from the bible depicted in them. Same painful wooden pews of course...oh, and the kneeling. LOL...which now I cheat and lop my butt onto the pew...(yes I said butt and pew) and fake kneel, I doubt anyone will care.

There were babies but the acoustics made it so they didn't dominate the sounds. There was no pipe organ! Shame...no room for it! There was...........a piano.....a dude with an electric guitar and....a drummer. Yup...their very own Tommy Lee. I was...shocked. The Priest, was American, and happy...he smiled...a lot! He waved to everyone. Despite its size the place probably holds 200 people or so, and he seemed to know a lot of them.

Yeah we sang some song, well they sang, I don't sing...some dude read from the Bible....and then the Priest talked....about.....well I don't even recall on that day as it was three yrs ago, but he talked and he was funny. He talked about normal every day stuff and in the end tied it into Christian doctrine. Then, some people carried the wafer down the aisle to him...and he read another passage and everyone got up to eat. No long drawn out story, the same story....no bells, no incense. Is this a Catholic Church? I assure you it was!

I stood up and after not attending Church in 7 yrs and I took Communion. I even gave a dollar in their "beg" basket. Then, it was over! We sang a song and poof, done! Forty whole minutes! I was shocked. I thought to myself, wow, that wasn't bad, not bad at all!

I went again last weekend, with William. I was terrified he'd cry and ruin everything for everyone. Instead he farted. Man what I would have given for those incense. We sat in the last row, at the end of the pew...the painful pew which killed my spine and tail bone....there was standing room only behind us, all of them no doubt staring at my gorgeous baby, who I wore in a sling, nice and snug.

I once again took that wafer! I listened as the Priest talked about the importance of fathers, it was after all Father's Day. Father Manning is a plump man of older age. He smiled, a lot and had great stage presence. It was obvious he wanted to be there. He was happy to be there. He made jokes and smiled and laughed....I thought it was a sin to smile in a Catholic Church.

So, in the end, after all those years...I thought I hated the Catholic Church. No, I thought I hated Church in general. Turns out...I didn't hate the Catholic Church....I just hated 'that' Catholic Church. The one that I'd always gone too....

Still though, despite my going to a different Church, I never did find the bathroom....