family – Glimpses of Joy

life in the time of COVID

Some quick takes from these last six weeks!

Life update. Just before Notre Dame moved classes online and everything shut down, Chris and I ended two weeks of intense discernment with a decision to move to Washington D.C this summer! Chris accepted an offer from Catholic University of America to do a PhD in Theology and, while I am very sad to leave South Bend, we’re excited for this next adventure! Now is the time for big, bold moves, right? Ha! (That’s Evangeline’s letter to her friend, Joe, saying, “You won’t see me because I am moving. I will send you letters.”) If you have friends in the D.C/Hyattsville area, hit me up, I’m looking for connections! 🙂

Podcast. I had this idea while I was thinking about how sad I was to be leaving – that I could do a podcast one day with my friend Annie, to keep our friendship going long-distance. When I mentioned it, she was so pumped and got the ball rolling, and here we are, about to record our first episode! Ha! I would still be in the brainstorming phase without her initiative. It’s called Laughs & Littles, and we’ll be talking about anything and everything about mom life – getting into the nitty gritty, because that’s what we always want more of from talks and podcasts! And now with COVID, it feels like a time to try new things. So, stay tuned for more on that!

Homeschool mornings. We love Evange’s preschool class, and it’s sad she won’t get to finish the year. But she adjusted really well to “school at home,” and the first three weeks were so peaceful, I couldn’t believe it. She never said she missed her friends and seemed so content to be home. We have a loose routine now, mainly, once Chiara takes her morning nap, we have about an hour of focused time. At first, Zelie would do her morning quiet time and I’d have one on one time with Evange, but lately Zelie’s been staying with us. Here are some things we’ve been rotating between that have been fun:
- Math
  - coin game – “bring me a penny, bring me a quarter, bring me 1 cent, bring me 26 cents, etc”
  - “buying” things
  - worksheets/dry erase workbook
  - patterns, Set, shapes on geo board
- Writing/Reading
  - writing with bananagram tiles
  - writing letters to pen pals
  - labeling things around the house
  - making a calendar project
  - worksheets/dry-erase workbook
- Art
  - Thursday is our Art & Prayer Corner day so I try to come up with an art project, or just get out paint and paper.
  - These paper dolls have been a hit
- Science
  - We have these great children’s encyclopedias from Chris’s mom, and Evange loves reading the World and Space one. She and Zelie say they are going to be astronauts when they grow up.

and then we try to get outside and play until lunch. Zelie usually wanders off and plays with her dolls, which is fine. If we get a warm sunny day, we just do as much outside time as possible.

Sundays. We made it to Eastertide! Holy Week at home was actually really cool. I always feel a lot of FOMO with littles that I can’t make it to everything, but this year I was drowning in resources for ways to do Holy Week at home! Since then, we’ve been keeping Sundays special by getting dressed up and either watching Mass with Bishop Barron or Mass at the Basilica, but lately we’ve had more success with “home Mass.” Evange likes processing in with a candle, cross, and cloth, and then we do the readings and some prayers and songs. Then we make a big brunch and, after, the girls watch this Children’s Liturgy of the Word that is fantastic. My sister-in-law also wrote up 9 ways to keep Sundays special and it’s a great resource.

April birthdays. We celebrated Zelie turning 3 on the 10th and Chris turning 30 on the 20th! Zelie requested an ice cream cake (not sure how she even knew about those) and it was delish, especially since I didn’t make it. We had a “party” all day with balloons, cinnamon rolls for breakfast, FaceTiming friends and family, cards and gifts from grandparents, a Lion King viewing, and pizza. And I made a carrot cake for Chris that I was happy to eat all the rest of the week, it was so good.
Books. Currently reading The Thorn Birds, and I love it and hate it. Love the setting and scope but the relationships are so messed up and I am ANGSTY about it. I didn’t love Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine but I’m glad I finished it. It was very similar to The Cactus, another Reese Witherspoon Book Club book … hm. I really liked A Gentleman in Moscow, and Olive, Again was okay. Then I read The Mercies, about a fishing village in Norway that loses all its men in a storm in 1617, and had to skip over parts when it got to the witch trials. I was reading while nursing in the middle of the night and couldn’t fall back asleep, I was so upset. So, not sure I recommend that one. The Water Dancer was really good, though. The magical realism was hard for me to get into at first, but then I enjoyed it.

Chiara. But speaking of nursing in the middle of the night, that’s down to only once in the very early morning now, and I’m stoked! Sleeeeeep! Chiara, or “The Keek,” is the best, and at such a cute age right now. She’s crawling and cruising around, playing peekaboo, starting to get into everything, and trying to climb the stairs. Can’t believe she’ll be a year old next month. Crazy.

That’s what’s new with us!

part of our story

As I’ve entered the second trimester of this pregnancy, I’ve been thinking about how this baby’s life has already changed our family’s story. About how this baby comes to us after losing another.

At the end of June, I had a miscarriage. I’d only known I was pregnant for ten days and had only told one friend. It was still so new, and then, it was over.

So this is my fourth pregnancy, my fourth baby. But I won’t explain that to strangers in the grocery store; I probably will hardly ever talk about it. For all outward appearances, this is Baby #3. But we know that there was a little soul who would have come to us in February, and we named him or her Valentine. It’s made me think about how many other families share this experience, how the question, How many kids do you have? becomes a bit more complicated to fully explain.

I may share more about the miscarriage and how we grieved and found closure, because I found it helpful to read about other women’s stories when it happened. But for now, we talk about Baby Valen with the girls, and we go and visit the cemetery where he or she (I’ll call her she), is buried. We’ve been looking for a way to volunteer time as a family, a way to engage in social justice in some way with the girls, but everything we’ve thought of has been too late in the evening for our current early dinner/bedtime schedule. So for now, in this season, we’ve landed on the spiritual work of mercy – pray for the living and the dead. We take the girls and pray a decade of the rosary and the prayer for the dead for the soul of Baby Valen and all the departed.

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I wish it wouldn’t have happened, of course. I wish I could have felt her move, held her, seen her, been able to get to know her. But I’ve been comforted by the reactions I’ve received from friends, and even the (free!) services offered by the local funeral parlor and cemetery. Overwhelmingly, it’s been – This is a person to bury, this is a person to grieve. Despite how common early miscarriages are, and the various factors that can cause them, I was never made to feel that this was something to just get over and forget about. And that’s been a good lesson and reminder for me, as we’ve talked about her with Evangeline. Baby Valen was still a baby, even though she was so little, and she will always be a part of our family. We can ask her to pray for us because we trust that she is with Jesus. It’s brought up good conversations about the communion of saints, the dignity of life, and death. And it just feels good to talk about her, this little person God sent to us for such a brief time.

Baby Valen, pray for us.

Goodbye, University Village

We only lived there for 8 months, but University Village was a remarkable place. It closed today after 56 years of housing married students with families at Notre Dame. 56 years containing so much life in such a small place. So many babies born, so many countries represented, so many friendships forged in the common ground of that unique season of life, doing grad school while raising kids.

Truly, finding an international village in South Bend, Indiana was a wonder and a joy. At the final mass in the community center, I found myself tearing up, seeing the children who had been born there, the ones who couldn’t remember any other home, and the parents who had been through so much with the community at their side.

I think we might have been debriefing a meeting with Housing or Affleck-Graves

I’m glad we made noise and asked the University to move forward on building a replacement, and I’m glad it appears to be in the works. But it is sad to lose a physical place that holds memories for so many, and to see the community scatter in the intermediary time.

We have the privilege to be able to buy a house here, and we did. I’m coming to love it. But even if I had known this house was waiting for us, I would choose to live in the Village again first, hands down. Being friends with our neighbors, Evangeline being able to run up the stairs to see if Nora and Jules or Carter wanted to play (Building D!), or take them some of the muffins we had just baked, or ask to borrow some ginger, it made Indiana feel like home. I felt known in an unfamiliar place.

The fire alarms in the middle of the night, the poorly insulated 500 sq foot apartment, it was all part of the deal. We could have neighbors over for game nights because we lived close enough for baby monitors to reach. Chris and I could go out and leave the monitor with the upstairs neighbors. I literally only survived, even thrived, in my first real winter, because every morning I knew I could go up and visit Rose without putting on layers and layers of clothes or having to drive (I didn’t drive at all the whole month of December). We were spoiled.

After a couple months of living in our new house, I’ve gotten used to it’s size. But at first I’d find myself standing somewhere thinking, I’m in just one room of this whole house. There’s a whole room for just this bathroom. And now it feels more normal but I still miss the small space we had. I could see or hear the girls wherever they were, messes were quickly picked up because otherwise there was no room to walk, and after tidying the living room and vacuuming from one plug, that was as clean as it got.

I have to be more disciplined now about not acquiring stuff just because it’s free or really cheap and I know we have room for it. It was nice to just not have room. That said, I am grateful for our house and I feel the need to be generous and hospitable with all the space we have now. We’re trying to get in a groove of hosting people for dinner or s’mores after the girls are asleep, and I’m making a point of moving the girls in together once our friend starts living with us so that there will still be a guest room ready for #peachtreeguests. (Wish me luck with that). 🏡❤️