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A Rising Tide

30 June, 2020/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Katie

Like the rest of the world, most of my goals took a beating this year.

But ever since school ended and the glorious freedom of summer has enveloped us – complete with pools of golden light in the mornings and walks around our neighborhood bursting with summer flowers and lush greens – I have felt a shift in my mind and my heart. It is bolstered by lake days with my people and beach days with strangers who I can finally, blessedly be around. It is also from a conviction that we can’t do anything to help the world if our own lives, if our own houses are not in order. We need strong hearts, strong minds, and strong bodies.

There is a powerful grace at work in the world, despite the pain and problems and discord. I saw it on FULL display at the Lux Summit last weekend with Leah Darrow and her amazing speakers. It radiates from Kristin’s ministry over at One Hail Mary at a Time. It can be seen in the work that Carrie Gress and Noelle Mering are doing at Theology of Home (their second book is coming out soon!) And it is definitely on overtime in Lisa Canning’s work. Her talk at the Lux summit was the most refreshing thing I had heard in a while, and I skip-hopped over to her Future Full of Hope seminar.

Man, is this girl on FIRE with setting goals and promoting positivity. All these ladies are, and their ministries all started with a dream God placed on their hearts. He works through our dreams and goals.

I normally set goals, and the power of small daily investments toward goals was my jam while I wrote my first novel. But recently between the twins and COVID and life with teens through toddlers I started to slowly put goals at arms reach. I stayed in survival mode and started to think there wasn’t anything extra that I could give – time, energy, focus – because I was so tapped. I started to slowly put myself last because I didn’t have that inner purpose that goals give you. Everyone else’s needs started to creep in to every crevice of time I had. I was like a boat at sea who lost the horizon line. Somehow, when this happens, doubt and fear and other people’s opinions creep in too.

I think this happens to a lot of us a lot of the time. We’re human and motherhood is hard. But it’s so important to catch when this has taken hold and turn it around.

A few weeks into the quarantine, I could feel myself losing my bearings, and I made the rather spontaneous decision to pick up the novel I was 10,000 words into and go at it with momentum. Every naptime, like a meditation, I escaped into a suspenseful world and by the time the twins woke up, my well was refilled.

This was great for the sliver of my life that is labeled ‘Career’ or ‘Meaningful Work’. But I lacked goals in the other areas of my life and they suffered. Working out, time with my husband, decluttering my house were all categories that were being put on the back burner. I walked everyday with the twins but I couldn’t find time to do a strength workout where I sweat, and I needed this. Running used to be this for me but my back doctor took an X-ray of my back and said I shouldn’t run any more, and I hadn’t found a replacement.

We’ve only had 1 class, but already all of the areas of my life have been given a jolt from the defibrillator paddles of her positivity. Lisa reminded me that the longings and dreams of our heart are gifts from God, and we should listen to them. When we do, waking up each day is exciting and fun and full of passion and purpose. Life feels like an adventure. And it tends to be contagious, which is huge for moms. When we are purposeful and passionate it rubs off on our kids.

I know this message is radiated elsewhere, but something about the way Lisa – who is a mom of eight and is very open about her families struggles especially with her husband’s depression and anxiety – says it that makes me listen and believe her. She showed us her goals and dreams that she has set that have come true, and the ones she is still working towards. They are all amazing. Since I sat down and started dreaming about what goals I have in my life, my attitude has totally changed. I’m not in survival mode. I’m looking forward to so many things and somehow far from taking the last bits of energy I have, working towards goals has given me more energy. In the last week I have:

Become fierce about protecting my work outs. I signed up for Beachbody and I’ve done Barre Blend every day. I forgot how awesome it is to be sore but strong and to move gracefully.

Went on a date night with my husband to a dreamy dinner and then sat at the beach and planned dreams for our future. I encouraged him in his dreams and it looks like we have a lot of travel in our future.

Created a vision board that is blowing my mind. What if these things came true?

Encouraged my kids in their goal setting and suddenly everyone is working out more and reading more.

Started the 54-day Rosary Novena. I usually read the daily readings and say the Rosary but I am already feeling the fruits of going deeper into my prayer life.

Maybe you need to be reminded just like I was that there is something special about flipping that switch and living intentionally as opposed to just surviving. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Books To Read While Writing

29 May, 2020/2 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Katie

When we first started out with this business of staying home/quarentining/living through a pandemic, I was talking with a friend who took her middle school son shopping. When he asked what toilet paper should he grab, she replied ‘any port in a storm.’

I still laugh at this image of them panic shopping, and this line has come to mean a lot to me in the past few months. We are all seeking out the things that comfort us, that bring us joy, or peace, or even just a dopamine hit (hello chocolate chip cookies). The people who walk with us, the Zoom calls with college friends, the routine of dinner. Like many people, books have become my biggest port in the storm. And the escape and joys and struggles of getting lost in writing my next novel has been my oasis.

It turns out a silver lining of taking our family schedule and just throwing it in the air is what happens between 2-4. Previously, my day looking like feeding and putting down twins around 1-1:30 for naps and then having my older four charge home from the bus at 2. Then there was welcoming, feeding, and taking in the requests of four busy kids before I made dinner and drove them to activites.

Now, by 2 everyone needs their own space.

What this has come to mean is I have time to write. Like clockwork I get a cup of tea, my favorite writing sweater, and these two cues put my mind in complete writing mode. And I write for 1.5-2 glorious hours, and I remember how the mornings I wrote my first novel were some of the happiest times I ever had. It is so fulfilling to sit down and not know what my mind will come up with, to be surprised everyday, to watch my word count grow and to have the next 5000 words already mapped out in my head. And the clearest sign that I should be doing it is how happy I am when the twins wake up, and I can’t wait to pick up where I left off tomorrow.

I started this book a while ago, and got busy with the twins around 10,000 words. Since quarantine started I’ve picked up momentum and am *almost* at 40,000 which is roughly half a novel. This is all first draft, and I look forward to the molding and shaping that take place in subsequent drafts. This draft just tells me it has the bones to become good, so its a track to run on.

I lot of people told me that they always wanted to write a novel and so I thought I would share the books that are really helping me. I read some of these when I wrote my first and I am returning to them constantly. Some are new ones I am reading/listening to along side writing.

Story Engineering – This book was so useful to organize my plot and feel confident about how to mold the story. He inspires you when you read it to try to push yourself and your writing powers to be the best they can be.

Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves – This is by the same writer, and I just picked it up. He makes you test your plot against criteria, and helps you elevate it in major ways. This is what I’ll be doing for the bulk of this summer. It is one of the reasons why I know my book has the bones to become good – I tested it against his criteria. Getting to the final good draft is another story and a long road but I can’t wait.

Word Painting –

I basically want to sit down and write whenever I read this book. It hones your powers of observation so that when you’re living your life, you notice more things, such as how clouds sometimes look like lily pads, and when you are writing you try hard to name the thing you are writing about correctly, such as the name of a flock of birds you are describing. It captures the really fun part of writing, and in many ways I use it more on the second draft when I have time to really think through the scenes and how to make them sing. For example, one excercise is to take an object and try to describe in in 20 different ways. You think of new things when you really try hard to paint a picture of something for someone else.

In the Woods – Tana French

The novel I am working on is a suspense novel, so I am trying to read other ones to get a feel for plot unfolding, building tensions, and of course great plot twists. French just nails her POV, her tension, her characters. Lots of great examples in her writing. Bonus: the turned it into a show called the Dublin Murders if your book stack is already too high.

Your Blue Flame – Jen Fulwiler’s book is basically the exact explanation of why I write. I started my novel before quarantine, and picked it up again before I listened to her book on Audible, but listening to it as I do dishes and fold laundry is a string of me nodding my head. She has helped me see why I need to write. Everyone will be better off if I do. This book will help anyone find their path.

The Bookshop on the Shore – Finding a new writer with a storytelling voice that sucks you in is an immediate way to be inspired to write. Bonus that this one deals with a love of books, as it centers around a bookshop and the people who work in it who have books like some people have best friends. A great reminder that reading is the healthiest escape, the best form of self care.

The Elements of Style: This book is probably the one I think about the most when I am reading over a scene or editing a nonfiction piece for freelance writing. It advocates removing every unnecessary word, and no piece isn’t improved by removing unneeded words since it always yields clarity. This will help a writer by leaps and bounds.

The Grief & Gifts of a Pandemic

28 April, 2020/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Katie

^My kids on one of our many, many family walks

For many people, this pandemic is loud and fast and devastating. They are working hard to save lives, or they are losing husbands or mothers overnight and facing the pain of their dying alone. Parents are being asked to do three jobs in the time it takes to do one, and financial catastrophe is deepening the worry lines of millions.

For most of us, the strain of being quarantined are taking its toll in quieter, but still grievous, ways. Having our lives put on hold, separated from friends and loved ones, with major milestones cancelled, the pandemic feels slow and empty and as monotonous as a hamster wheel. Businesses are closing. One of the magazines I wrote for regularly folded. Children in homes with abuse or neglect might be the biggest victims of this time, with wounds suffered in silence that can last a lifetime.

For Catholics, it seems that we are more equipped to deal with the suffering that goes along with this pandemic. We know how to be patient, to sacrifice, and to will the good of the other, whether it is a bored toddler or an elderly neighbor down the street. But on the other hand, we are all discovering the new longing of living without the presence of the Eucharist. To our modern minds this is unfathomable, though the lives of the saints are filled with examples of the Eucharist being less available due to traveling priests, sickness, or war. We are awakened to our hunger for it, and perhaps realizing how much it means to us, to not take for granted gathering at Mass or receiving the sacraments, will be a gift that keeps on giving long after the Church doors have reopened.

In between the hard moments and bored moments and moments where we’re actually ok, when we’re reflecting on everything that has happened in the last few months, or scouring the corners of our day to find what brings us joy, there is a unique opportunity. These are new experiences, and they give rise to new insights. They let us see what good things our lives have had all along, and what disordered things are there that don’t belong. With the smoke of everyday business cleared we can ask, what are my deepest longings? What do I value most? The chance to shed so much of the dead weight we all carried around is a gift unlike any other we’ve received.

In a recent Washington Post article and subsequent NPR interview about it, the writer Sarah Menedick shared how for those who suffer from anxiety, a pandemic actually helps to lessen theirs. All of a sudden, she says, “it was like my priorities shifted. And it was, well, thank God that I’m healthy. And thank God I’m here with my family. And who cares about sunscreen, you know?”

She adds, “I think a lot of anxiety is about not being able to accept any uncertainty at all and having to sort of try and control everything all the time. And I think in a situation of real fear, like the one that we’re living in now, where, you know, we know people who have passed away from this illness, all of a sudden, my anxiety just seems like it doesn’t matter, you know? Like, it’s completely futile.”

The gift this pandemic has given us is a new way to look at our life, to go back to the drawing board with more perspective. To look at what was working and what wasn’t, and to value what life is made up of: time. We have loads more of it for some things, like our family, slow living, cooking, playing with our kids, chatting with our friends. And so much less of it for striving, getting ahead, competing, defining our ego by doing things.

It seems in some ways that Americans are being forced to try out the European way of life. We’ve had to give up some of the hallmarks of our culture – working overtime, traffic, mega-prioritization of sports, overly scheduled days, meals on the run – and trade them for a way of life that offers leisurely cooking a meal, family time, plenty of sleep, creativity, having a drink with friends even if it is with six feet or a screen between us. For some of us this experiment is a welcome change, and slower living suits us. My friends who take walks together keep whispering, how will we ever go back? For my New Englander hard working husband, going back can’t come soon enough.

For myself, the slowdown of my kids’ activities has allowed me to commit every nap time to writing. Pushing through a second novel is reminding me that some of my best, happiest days were quietly writing my first. This is my biggest gift of this time: I need to write. It is my best version of self care and I am better for it. And more than ever, the value of artistic escape can be seen with every movie, show podcast and novel we lose ourselves in. If we needed an argument for the value of art, this pandemic is a good one.

Now that quarantine has become a new way of life and not just a temporary phase, we have weird schedules and a new way of carrying out our responsibilities. Old pockets of time we had to ourselves – commutes and work outs and quiet houses – are gone. Introverts and extraverts are both finding challenges and new ways to meet their needs and hopefully offering grace to each other in our differences. While I know my kids are missing their friends so much, the complete pause on all external stimuli mean they are being forced to find simple ways to be happy, to look out at the mid space as Anna Quindlin says, and see what makes them tick. My hope is that this discovery lasts long after we’ve returned to normal. Still, their spirits are definitely constrained now that we have entered the long haul, and I can’t wait for them to reconnect with the smiling faces that used to pepper their days.

It’s frustrating how much of the grief we’ve experienced is augmented by the media. They didn’t cause the virus, but the helped cause the pandemic. They intentionally tell stories to cause fear, alarm, panic, because those emotions make people pay attention, and I am growing weary of these intentions. Two side by side headlines this morning revealed the schizophrenia: one had the POV of a coroner, seeing people carelessly going for hamburgers and haircuts as his next body in a bag, and the next headline held that lower income populations might starve if we don’t open up the economy. Both meant to stoke fear. Free press is important, but we have a press that everyone I know actively tries to steer clear of, and I wonder when they will realize that peddling fear is a pyrrhic victory.

There is a good chance that we return to our normal way of life and the old habits will resume – overtime, traffic, stress. Some might return to their old anxiety. But there is still the hope that we might try to stay connected to what we learned when life slowed down for a minute. When we finally had more time with our family, get to know our kids, and pursue passions and health. And we will remember what we did with our time: learning, creating art, planting a garden, trying to connect, trying to stay strong, trying to love. Despite the fear, we’re made in his image, and this pandemic is a still life portrait of what it means to be human. His goodness hasn’t changed, even if everything else has.

March Madness

14 March, 2020/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Katie

Greetings from the land of quiet, of snow, of a beautiful frozen lake and toddlers that are eating Lucky Charms as we speak.

We left the craziness of our home town in Portsmouth, NH and went north to our house in Maine, with gratitude for a Target that still has toilet paper and a conscious decision to stop reading the news. We are no stranger to illness – the twin’s hand, foot and mouth disease has already had me quarantined for the last week and a half, and kept Ronan and me home from the ski mountain today.

Being here has given me some space to breathe, to look back at the events of the past week, and get out from under the cloud of anxiety hovering everywhere. I can point to when the panic spiked in and around me – Thursday morning, where in the span of one Pilates video a text chain of my friends went from should we be stocking up? to my sister has no toilet paper in Michigan. When I checked out at Target approximately 90 minutes later I looked like a crazy person with the volume of stuff on the conveyer belt. When I let everyone behind me know I have six kids, they just nodded, and one of them said, “I think you might need more wine.” As I unloaded everything from the car, I noticed that I felt the way I did on 9/11. Aware that bad things might happen, but totally unsure about when and what degree. Worrying for the elderly, the homeless, single working mothers were all mixed in with do we have enough diapers and wipes?

I noticed the unease in my belly as I drove up here and had some time to examine it. Perhaps you do too? Mine was fueled by the very little windows I had to shop while the twins napped, the news, and the heavy sighs from the Rite Aid clerk as I piled Tylenol, disinfectant spray, more wine (took their advice) and Scrabble on the counter. How to pass the time with kids home from school? We have one answer now. But the fear that drove me to grab it is unsettling.

I confess my food hoarding tendencies are in full effect, even though I rationally know we’ll be fine.

It is curious watching myself sooth my anxieties. On Tuesday I read that New Jersey ran out of hand sanitizer and in the next minute I bought eight bottles on Amazon. That seems crazy until you consider that there are none on Amazon now and I’ve handed them out to my elderly mother and neighbors. I texted my husband to buy two gallons of milk even though I brought two gallons for the weekend. When he looked at my quizzically I said, just in case our grocery delivery doesn’t really come on Monday. He just nodded. We are caught in a moment where the thing that breeds fear the most – uncertainty for the future – is everywhere and it is so easy to be swept up in that tide and become part of it.

Here’s the thing: it’s ok to feel uncertain and do weird things that make you feel better and have no rational explanation. We’re human. We don’t need to shame people for being afraid. But then take a moment to breathe and take a walk and pray. Process. Driving up here I called my sister and best friend and cried laughing at how crazy it all is, and felt immediately restored to myself. Ditto whenever I take a walk, hang out with friends, and pray. I’m paying attention to my body, and where it’s holding fear. And to my thoughts, and the ones that lead to panic I’m trying to lay down, while the ones that restore me to my better self I’ll seek out in the coming weeks. Community, prayer, nature, books. The good things are all still right there. The good news is too: we are loved, God is in his heaven, and this too shall pass.

There is a part of me that is hopeful that slowing down and families being together is actually what everyone really needs. It is a tragedy that it is taking people getting sick and dying to do it. But maybe when the tide of fear goes out, we’ll come out of this time surprisingly whole, and find treasures of community and caring and family memories left over, like seashells in the sand.

In the meantime, this scripture was the reading from early this week, and is pretty perfectly suited to these events. Thank you for reading this little corner of the internet, dear friends! I hope you all stay well. xo Katie

JER 17:5-10

Thus says the LORD:
Cursed is the man who trusts in human beings,
who seeks his strength in flesh,
whose heart turns away from the LORD.
He is like a barren bush in the desert
that enjoys no change of season,
But stands in a lava waste,
a salt and empty earth.
Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,
whose hope is the LORD.
He is like a tree planted beside the waters
that stretches out its roots to the stream:
It fears not the heat when it comes,
its leaves stay green;
In the year of drought it shows no distress,
but still bears fruit.
More tortuous than all else is the human heart,
beyond remedy; who can understand it?
I, the LORD, alone probe the mind
and test the heart,
To reward everyone according to his ways,
according to the merit of his deeds.

On the Y, KonMari and Dreaming (and Other Thoughts for the New Year)

17 January, 2019/1 Comment/in Uncategorized/by Katie

Back in December, my thoughts for the new year beyond mothering my six kids included plans like writing a book, running another half marathon, and organizing my house. Then God laughed at those plans. At least some of them.

I got a tear in my knee playing pickle ball (half marathon – out), and my au pair broke her wrist Christmas Day and left two days later (writing a book – mostly out). I got back from skiing after New Year’s feeling like I was in a snowglobe and I couldn’t see the next step (which I know is a good place to be spiritually because trust and faith and all that but its’s also really uncomfortable when you’re in it). I didn’t even know how I would manage that first week with my husband gone M-F at a meeting and the big kids having sports at nap time and bed time. Telling my 6th grader he couldn’t go to basketball wasn’t an option. Neither was bringing cranky babies. Military wives, you’re my heroes.

But as usual, God knew what he was doing.

My old sitter was back in town and in between jobs and happy to help us. I decided to go to the Y gym three times a week while the babies played happily in the day care. The second day, my neighbor Dian, who moved to my street from Dublin two years ago, showed up in the parking lot, looking like an angel in spandex, waving at me. “Hello mah dear!” We worked out on things that didn’t hurt my knee (a weight class & the elliptical, yay) for nearly two hours. Dian says things like, ‘you did brilliant!’ and ‘shall we have some Champagne then?’ which would alone make me love her but she is fun and smart even without the Champagne.

Turns out going to the Y for a few hours a week and working out with friends is much, much better for my soul than managing a 21-year-old, much as we loved her. I could feel months of stress melting off of me that I didn’t even know was there.

Perhaps because I entered the New Year so thrown for a loop or twelve, I started to pay attention to all the advice people were offering on social medial. Turns out there are a lot of opinions about how to start off a New Year well. I was amazed at how many official stances on resolutions there were as I checked my phone in between unpacking and putting away Christmas stuff.

The advice panned out as it quickly led me to the KonMari train. The idea that putting order in our homes will put order in our relationships will put order in our lives is so intoxicating, isn’t it? In years past I have used the equally effective show Horders to help me clean up from Christmas, which will have you pitching stuff faster than you can say ‘does this spark fear?’. But Marie is much nicer to look at than people locked into a prison inside their own homes.

Starting to KonMari my house helped me get my bearings. But it didn’t take long to figure out that what I really needed – and I suspect many people did too – was to just listen to the quiet. After all the giving, all the parties, all the joy-making, I needed to hibernate, to listen to my own thoughts and heart. In the age of social media, it’s so easy to be flooded with other people’s voices. We have to keep reminding ourselves that it is the still, small voice inside us that we need to hear the most.

What I heard when I listened was actually a lot of questions, and even though they sounded a little like Marie’s translator, I knew they were really my own. What did I treasure about the last year? What did I want to leave there and not bring with me into the new year? What are the changes I want to make? What are the ways I will still love and forgive myself when change is hard?

When I reflected on my dreams and desires for the new year, I had this sense that the most powerful catalyst for change is the feeling of possibility. And there is nothing in our adult lives (pregnancies aside) to let us feel the power of possibility like emptiness. It is pure potential, it is the heart of creativity, it is magic. So I cleared off my window seat, and got to work journaling those answers while the babies slept.

Perhaps the best thing about the New Year is simply the clean, empty pages in the calendar waiting to be written on, but not marked up just yet. Not claimed yet for this commitment or that obligation, instead holding the power of possibility in its emptiness. Without an au pair, I didn’t have to plan out every day. Where I previously felt like I had to do all the things, now I made time for journaling, for getting down on the floor and playing with babies, for working out with a friend at the gym. And I bloomed instantly in the emptiness.

I suspect this is why KonMari has taken hold at the start of a new year. Because the same quiet, the same emptiness that holds possibility in our time is also true for our space. And when we have room in our lives – in our homes and our calendars – our hearts have a chance to spread out a little, seek out what they love, put down deeper roots, and find peace.

It’s a lesson I need to keep relearning, and one I think God teaches us over and over. He uses things like sickness and injury and pregnancy and babies to do it sometimes, but he has to get through somehow.

So here’s to slowing down and finding joy. To quieting the space in your homes. And as much as parents of small kids can, finding quiet in the space in our calendar. Let’s also do the same for our hearts – clean out unnecessary fears, and unrealistic expectations, and find a window seat to sit and think. Or at the very least, clean off the one you already have. When we do, we are left with all of our dreams, and the hope that they might come true. Which is exactly where I want to be at the start of a new year.

A Year in the Life {Squared}

4 December, 2018/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Katie

Well, the twins turned one.

It might be obvious to anyone looking at a before and after photo of our family, but it took a long time for my brain to wrap around going from 4 to 6 kids. It might still be wrapping.

The reality is there are so many different aspects of the changes to our family, to my role as a mom, and so I have just been trying to go slow, have grace for myself and others, and adjust to these changes. Almost daily, I think through what I hope to accomplish, and then somewhere around 11 am I realize I’m going to have to reset those expectations. Those would have fit with 4 kids all in school, but they don’t fit with twin teething babies or sleep deprivation or two chubby bodies on the move, even with help.

And my work plate has been very full with lots of different opportunities, but my quiet mornings of just writing have been fewer than I’d like. So I am taking this one to record the highlights of this year, since one day I’ll muse about this time, and like every twin mom I know I’ll say to myself, “That first year was a blur” and I’ll wish I had written it all down. So as a gift to my future self, I’m doing just that here.

Having twin babies is like drinking out of a fire hose every day. There is a lot of joy, and laughter and awe and amazement. But there isn’t a lot of rest. There were many, many moments this past year with a line of five urgent things that needed to get done right this second. It was triage. It was ER room-esque shifts, complete with a 12-hour cycle but without the days off. Moms with multiple kids know this feeling. When we had 3 kids 3 and under it was also stressful. But it was a different kind of stress. It was everyone in diapers, no one can get themselves a drink kind of stress.

Having big kids alongside baby wrangling is at once easier and harder. I had baby holders but also big kid schedules to run while I was in the baby trenches. I was coordinating with teachers and doctors and handy men and sitters and family and friends for rides, tests, homework, illnesses, playdates, birthdays and life at the same time as I was sleep deprived and empty and v v busy putting diaper cream on one baby while keeping the other one’s hands out of said diaper cream.

For a good two years my desires – writing and running and working – were slowed while I grew two humans. (And for the record, they were completely and totally worth it.) There was a lot of growing and stretching on the outside, and then on the inside as I had to say no to hard things, dig deep for patience often, cling to prayer, and put others first not once, or twice, but six times over.

This year has taught me so much about pouring yourself out, and about living life moment by moment. It’s surprising that no matter how hard your circumstances are, doing this really does yield joy and peace and a deeper happiness than I have ever known. And the best lesson of this year is celebrating the way that community helps us, and adds so much to our lives.

So here is a look back on some of the big moments of the past year. The ones that we lived through laughing, white knuckling, praying or celebrating. I never in my wildest dreams would have thought my life would look like this but I am so so grateful it does.

1. Birth Story: There was the end-of-a-twin-pregnancy chapter, which was a special endurance race the likes of which I have never encountered.

And then all of a sudden, they were born.

We knew that one of the twins was very likely to have Down syndrome from our testing done around week 13. I wrote about it here. But I was so overwhelmed with getting big at the end of the pregnancy, and the strain of every day, that the idea of one of them having Down syndrome receded.

But I remember laying on the c-section table, and hearing the first baby’s cry – it was Michael, and he was so beautiful!

And then I remember laying there, feeling the weirdness of them pulling a baby out of me, watching my husband’s eyes peer over the blue curtain, and when they had pulled the baby out, I knew from the change of his flicker that Ronan had Down syndrome. Then there was a cry, but also an odd silence from the medical team before they cheered this baby too. My husband whispered in my ear what I already knew. Ronan has Down syndrome.

And he was so stinking cute.

Right after he was born, Rob went over and looked into Ronan’s eyes, and he says he immediately stared into his soul. And most people who meet him say the same thing.

It turns out it’s pretty easy to love a baby with Down syndrome, because they are, um, a baby.

So the rest of the stay was a lot of snuggles and feeding and diaper changes. I didn’t love having a c-section, and as pragmatic as I am and believe the only thing that really matters is what is good for the baby(ies) I missed the way postpartum happens with a vaginal birth. But I was totally in love and in awe of our double blessing!

I worried when there were issues with Ronan feeding in the hospital though. He didn’t nurse well, and he didn’t bottle feed well. And there were issues when we got home. It would take an hour to give him 1-2 mls of milk. We were discharged on Day 4 and on Day 5 a visiting nurse came and spent 3 very unhelpful hours telling me that Ronan ‘just needed a longer nipple’. There was some concern that his body temp was 96 degrees, but I was scheduled to see the pediatrician the next day.

This picture was taken while we were waiting for the pediatrician, who came in and took his temperature, which was 95 degrees and said we needed to go to Boston Children’s Emergency Room right away. I was unprepared for this news, as my snapping the photo at this time may suggest.

2. The NICU + Surgery: Then we enter the chapter that could be called ‘health crisis’ and as anyone who has had one of these knows, they are stressful and hard and harrowing. Especially when you are recovering from a C-section, are nursing a newborn, and have four older kids at home.

But you get through a crisis through prayers, grace, love and the amazing support of neighbors and family. And we had so much faith and confidence in our doctors at Boston Children’s, and felt so fortunate at the success of Ronan’s pull-through surgery and placement of a g-tube. All those prayers helped!

Still, I was surprised at some of the PTSD that showed up months later. Like every time I saw the gauze pads I used to have to tape around his g-tube, or how how emotional I was this Halloween, remembering a year ago when Ronan was still in the hospital. You feel incomplete when you don’t get to take your baby home with you, when you are worried about vital statistics from an hour away and rely on amazing nurses to show your baby the care you want to give. I know many NICU parents describe this feeling. You don’t take having your baby home and healthy for granted after that.

In fact, Ronan’s whole stay opened my eyes to how many struggles other people go through. I wrote about this period here in this post entitled Love In A Time of NICU. Suffering is hard, but if it leads to compassion for other people that is beautiful.

3. Homecoming/Life with Two Babies: Ronan’s homecoming was so joyful and at the same time was the beginning of life taking care of two babies. The day after he was discharged, it was Sophie’s birthday. She just admitted to me last week, a year later, how hard it was to have a mom who just had her first night with two babies and was sleep deprived, how she really wanted a sleep over but we had to say no. Though I wished it hadn’t fallen on her birthday and the mom guilt storm brewed mightily, I know there is growth in her too from this experience, and her birthday this year included both a sleepover party and an iPod, so she has recovered, I think.

We hit our stride around Christmas…

There were still a lot of doctors appointments and sleepless nights but the joy of kids anticipating Christmas is enough to keep a sinking barge afloat, let alone a sleep-deprived mom of twins. I snapped the pic in the very center of this collage, with our little baby Jesus that was left in the diaper bag after a special blessing at church, as I waited for two hours (!) for a cardiologist to meet with us (he was cleared of a slight stenosis that had righted itself, thank God). It ended up being the center photo for the year, which sums it up nicely.

He was at the very center of our year, of our lives, which is where He should be. And why I felt so much joy.

4. Months 2-7: The Crunch

Overall, the hardest thing about this year was the sleep deprivation. I wrote about on another post (the sleep training one) but in short, my description is this:

There is an acute edge to sleep deprivation. It is subtle, incessant, fluid, crushing, quiet and loud at the same time. Everything you have in you that makes you strong is quiet; everything that overwhelms you and makes you cranky and sucks patience out of you is loud.

I am convinced a babies smiliest days coincide with the hardest days of sleep deprivation.

We also had one of the hardest weekends ever when both babies were admitted for pneumonia (Ronan) and bronchiolitis (Michael). I spent 7 hours in the ER on Saturday with Ronan and 6 hours with Michael on Sunday.

Though these babies didn’t sleep that well, they did travel well. They barely ever cried in the car since they always had siblings talking to them or handing them a bottle from the front. We took them to Florida and they did great on the plane!

We also had a lot of trips up to the White Mountains of NH, and to Maine, and they did so well driving in the car. Again big kids helped so much. So much easier than traveling with just little kids.

In reality, these months were very focused on keeping life going for big kids – as I pulled out these pictures of the twins, they were surrounded by pictures of basketball, skiing, eating, performing, dancing, baseball, lacrosse and swimming with our big kids. We didn’t slow down much.

The double twin stroller was a constant fixture in our community. As was the big black van. We survived on wheels and grace.

You might (or might not at all) remember that my husband travels for work. We got through this time with an au pair, but at this point in the year, we lost our trust in her after our dog went missing one weekend when we left her with the big kids for a wedding and she seemed…unconcerned. We very amicably suggested rematch and all learned a lot and still keep in touch.

5. Months 8-12: Flying Solo + More Sleep

Once they started to sleep more, I could breath, though early morning wake ups were still common which was hard when we flowed into the summer, and big kids were home with lots of energy and wanted to stay up late. We had a great summer sitter who helped us survive, and I couldn’t have done it without her since my husband had to travel a lot for work this year.

Signs that I lost my mind include getting an aquarium after a fair fish died:

And thinking the beach could be fun with twins. It is impossible alone, survivable with two adults, and a much much better idea to get a sitter for the babies and take the big kids, which is what I did a few times.

The thing that really helped us is joining a pool with lifeguards and bringing a playpen the babies could go in. They seemed to do great when they were outside, in the shade, with lots of toys. We brought that playpen everywhere – parties, the beach, BBQs, and the pool. It might be my #1 twin survival tool in addition to the Snap and Go stroller.

And then in August we got another au pair who has worked out great!

Even though it’s still hard and every day is fuuulllllll to the brim, I feel like a new chapter has started for all of us. One with sleep and actually getting dressed, and making plans that a year ago we wouldn’t have. We actually took them out to dinner and a parade this weekend and they did great, I actually got to enjoy both events as opposed to sweating I was working so hard.

I’ve heard that the next year is also a tough one with twins. Things like playgrounds and pools and malls are really hard, and now Ronan is very mobile and into everything too so I am happy/scared to report I think we will have two kids going in two directions.

Like every parent, the best things about this year is getting to know a new personality (or two). Michael is VERY determined, and very smart and surprisingly sweet. He is always giving the best hugs. Rob calls him Hudini because no matter what gate/chair/box you use to block him from something we will figure out a way to get around it. He said, ‘all done’ at 8 months when I was trying to teach him the baby sign – just skipped right over the hand gestures – and started walking at 10.5 months. He studies everything and is always looking around for who is having the most fun, and then makes a bee-line for that sibling. He is a man of action.

Ronan is such an observer, and surprises us all the time by showing he knows what’s going on. He can manipulate toys better than Michael, and figures out what do with them before his brother even sits down. He LOVES his bath. He also loves 5 am wake ups which were trying to dissuade him from liking. But now that he is crawling the world is his oyster. And I don’t think I have ever seen a human light up the way Ronan does when you pick him up, and then it’s the giggle jackpot if you tickle him.

Looking back, this year was the first one that mom guilt really ate at me. I think it’s just a part of having twins, since you can’t always give to both of them. I spend a lot of time sitting down on the floor so I can hold them both at the same time and they don’t see me holding one when they are reaching for me. I also feel a strange protection for each of them – when Ronan gets attention or I share about his Down syndrome, I’m trying to make sure the world knows how special I think Michael is too! And when Michael gives kids more reaction and they favor him, I’m like ‘Ronan will get there! He will be so reactive too once he gets to know you!’ So there’s a snap shot into my craziness for you, if you were wondering.

And I am always talking to the older ones about what they need, and trying to carve out special time with each one of them. But on the whole, their adoration for their baby brothers far outweighs any angst. Andrew especially could have felt a lot of growing pains, but he just loves the babies, and tells anyone he sees about them.

When I look back on this year, I have this throbbing nostalgia for how much my other kids have grown while I was so busy. Andrew being 5 is just blowing my mind, and RJ and Sophie are practically teenagers. Lucy is at the best age – 9 – where she is still holding on to girlhood while she tries on big kids qualities and develops the best sense of humor. It’s just the nature of drinking out a firehose that it’s harder to pay attention to what’s going on around it, but I am trying with all of my might, because I want to remember everything about them at these ages.

People are always asking me how I do it, and the answer is I don’t do it alone.

Love and grace got us through this past year. For the babies, for each other, for the unexpected gifts life brought all of us. God knows how to give the best gifts we don’t even know to ask for, and then he sends the grace to help carry them.

Life with six kids isn’t going to get easier any time soon, but I know that will keep carrying us through, and will keep bringing us so much joy.

Lots of people say we’re crazy (including our close friends!) but when I think about how much fun it is to love these people, I think it’s crazy not to love this many kids and having this much joy. They are so so worth it.

We love you Michael and Ronan!

Thoughts On Our First Down Syndrome Awareness Month

1 October, 2018/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Katie

I originally wrote this post six months ago for our first Down Syndrome Day (3/21), but I am reposting it again on October 1, since it is Down Syndrome Awareness Month. Getting to know our son, getting to love him, is such a gift and I am still in awe.

Sometimes our most definitive moments are loud – a birth, a death, an accident, a promotion.

But sometimes they happen quietly, in the smallest of spaces between otherwise ordinary moments.

I was thinking about this the other day as I was giving our baby Ronan a bath. About the path that led me to him, to being the mother of a child with Down syndrome. His birth wasn’t the defining moment for me – it happened much earlier, when I was a grad student working towards my PhD in Philosophy.

I was taking a course on French Existentialism – a lot of Sarte and Camus. My professor was a middle-aged gentleman with a Scottish last name and good sense of humor. In the course of reading the material, there was a section on the randomness of our own existence. I remember my professor expounding on the happenstance of our mom having an egg and our dad having a sperm and they met, and it was you, and if it had been a day, a week, a month later, you wouldn’t be you. It would be a different egg, a different sperm. Logically all of this is true. And the conversation was basically, as soon as you embrace this fact, as soon as you accept that randomness, then you get to move on to clear, rational thinking. My professor had a pretty clear attitude that anyone who thinks differently is an intellectual peon.

So your existence was entirely dependent on two microscopic physical things meeting. And that’s it. Nothing more. He went on from there to discuss some other point, but I was stuck. Logically, this was true but it left out so much about human existence. Like you are loved, that you are known, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. I was totally depressed by this idea. I know because when I left class and was filled with these thoughts, someone bumped into me, and they looked at me and said, “Geez, why don’t you try smiling. You look miserable.”

This strangers’ comments woke me up to how low I must have gotten while stuck on this idea – it actually showed on my face. I remember looking around after they said it, at the very modern campus of SUNY Albany in the throes of late winter, and everything was white and brown and stark, with sharp angles and no curves, nothing soft, no color or beauty or life or hope. The world view I was surrounded by – literally and figuratively – was so bleak.

It hit me right then, as I looked around: You get to choose. Beauty or bleakness. Meaning or Randomness. It’s up to you. It’s up to each of us. Either way, it’s faith. We get to choose which version to put our faith into. But what I knew for sure was that without that belief that you matter, that you mean something, that your life has worth and value, that you are loved, everything else we can talk about as humans falls flat. In that moment in between classes on a winter day, I looked up at the sky and thought: I choose beauty. I choose meaning. I choose joy.

And then my eye caught on a tree that was just starting to sprout tiny green buds. The instant I made that choice, I could see life, beauty, new growth.

It was shortly after this that I found out I was expecting my first child.

From the moment I glanced at a positive pregnancy test, I loved my child. And in the next heart beat there was a feeling to protect and nurture this life.

By the time I was seven months pregnant, I was in my second year of my Phd program, and I had to present a paper I wrote for my Medical Ethics class. The paper was on the ethics of aborting children who through testing were shown to have Down syndrome or other genetic problems. I chose the topic since I had a special needs sister. In preparation for this paper, I remember reading a book by a father who had a child with Down syndrome, and he listed all of the difficulties of life with him in his attempt to be honest. It was his account of how he experienced Down syndrome. But between the lines of his honesty, I remember it was clear that intellectual capabilities were very important to him as a writer, and that much of his difficulty came from his son lacking in this sacrosanct area.

My research also led me to a program at Mass General on Down syndrome education. The doctor who led this group was frustrated at how the medical community had previously treated Down syndrome. The goal of this group was awareness. They lobbied that if you look at the actual lives of families who have a child with Down syndrome, they are full of joy and happiness and report high quality of life, much higher than the medical community previously reported. They hoped to connect those who may have a baby with Down syndrome with those families living with those same children to at least explore what life looked like before they decided to abort.

Most people have heard the stories of unsuspecting parents giving birth to a baby with Down syndrome and being told, ‘they will never say I love you. They will never lead a normal life.’ So much fear. We don’t have to look too far in our past to a time when Down syndrome meant institutionalization, and in many parts of the world like China and Eastern Europe this is still the case. (Side note: these children are up for adoption and you can see their faces on the website for Reese’s Rainbow, and it will break your heart.) This group, I was excited to learn, was trying to dispel this fear through sharing stories.

As I researched this topic, I imagined what I would do if I had received this test result for the baby I was carrying. I could follow the logic of my professor for this course – a very liberal, funny, brilliant woman – who held, like my Scottish professor, that this child growing was just a random egg, and a random sperm, and if one of those things was ‘faulty’ then of course, like making a mistake with the measurements of ingredients while making a cake, you could just dump out the batter and start again.

But every cell in my body went against this idea. I fell back to that definitive moment in between my classes, in the courtyard where someone pointed out to me what it did to my soul to believe that one life is just a random occurrence. It can be erased like the period at the end of a sentance.

I realized that there was no way I could do anything but love my baby, with the same love that had sprung up the instant I learned that an egg and sperm had met. That wouldn’t change if they had Down syndrome. It would bring with it concerns and questions, ones that this program at Mass General was trying to address, but throw it out like cake batter gone bad? Erase like a period at the end of a sentence? Impossible. My paper argued that it is a form of selective prejudice that is morally harmful to society, since it impacts the way we view members of that group who are living. My professor made it very clear that she disagreed with my conclusion.

This type of thinking from the professors in my program weighed on me. Continuing to view the world in this secular, rationalist way was making me depressed. Later, a friend whose brother was a priest shared with me that the hardest time of his years in the seminary were the ones studying modern philosophy. I had loved getting my Masters in philosophy at a Jesuit college, couldn’t wait to teach philosophy in literature, and had loved my time teaching logic and ancient philosophy at Nazareth College in upstate New York. But here, over and over, my classes slammed the innocent. When we were reading Justice is Fairness by John Rawls, we were following his treatise about building a fair and just society that broke down barriers based on race, sex and economic status. I can get behind that, says every compassionate, rational person, including me. And then you get to the part where he is building it back up, and holds that if a citizen is mentally incapacitated then they are not protected by the constitution, since only the members of a society that contribute to that society should justly receive its benefits. That’s only fair.

Wait, I thought. How did we go from making society fair and just to saying that someone with special needs doesn’t have the rights of the constitution? We all know the last time we had human beings who were not protected as equally as other human beings it looked a lot like slavery. Another student in my class was the mother of a child with special needs, and she raised her hand and asked, is he really saying that? Yup, said yet another professor who agreed with this view that faulty humans are less than. It’s the only way a truly just society can be structured.

While other biases such as racism and sexism (which are active in our culture for sure) would not be tolerated in a modern liberal philosophical text book, a bias against the mentally handicapped is supported, championed even, right there in black and white.

My travels in my Philosophy PhD program are certainly not the first time our society has revealed that we hold a deep bias towards those with disabilities. But for some reason that I couldn’t know at the time, it was intensely personal for me to simultaneously be a new mother and buy into the world view that human lives don’t matter unless they are smart, productive, successful. The contradiction between these two experiences, these two viewpoints – that life has meaning in and of itself, or it doesn’t – affected something deep in me. I grew anxious, and snappy. Debating these truths with people who were very satisfied with their choice that life is random and can’t be ascribed meaning grew so exhausting, and everything outside of my smiling boy seemed dark and heavy.

Based on how miserable my program was making me and how happy I was when I was with my son, a happy, healthy, chubby six-month old baby (and the lack of philosophy jobs for sure), my husband and I agreed that it made sense for me to stay home and pursue writing and raise our family. After all of the arguing and emptiness of my philosophy program, it was a relief to focus on nurturing and nourishing things: food as a way to show love, motherhood, writing a novel filled with hope.

I was remembering this whole path as I squeezed warm water over Ronan’s tiny body, his eyes staring at me, smiling when my eyes met his.

Many people in the world he was born into hold the view that he was just a random egg and sperm meeting. And when they met, they created a defective human. Faulty. Less then. Throw in some medical science to further prove he is just a statistic, and say that the fact that I had him and his brother at 40 was not the result of a meaningful creation, but one of pure, rational probability, since there is a higher incidence of twins and Down syndrome with advanced maternal age.

But what all these statistics and theories can’t explain is why having these boys has made me so indescribably happy. How Ronan is hard-wired for love, for innocence. That I feel a peace that I am exactly where I should be in this universe. How much joy he brings.

That moment when I realized we all get to choose, and I chose meaning and joy, prepared me more than any other to be Ronan’s mom. And having Ronan feels like that faith was rewarded. Now I get to receive joy over and over again by being his mom. His life is such a gift – he has already touched his family and community deeply. He has already sowed the seeds of friendship with new friends. The same society that views him as not a whole person he is strengthening, softening, building, one person that meets him at a time.

The reality of these two world views doesn’t just play out in philosophy classrooms. Iceland just bragged that they eliminated Down syndrome by eliminating every child that had a positive prenatal diagnosis. Last month, my husband was at a work event and when a gentleman said he had two kids, he added they were pregnant with a set of twins, but one had Down syndrome, so they aborted them both. When I saw one OB doctor in our practice and told her that I wasn’t afraid of Down syndrome, she indicated it was ok for me since I didn’t have a demanding job, unlike her doctor friend who (rationally) decided she couldn’t care for a Down syndrome child and do her job, so she aborted them.

I am not trying to shame these choices. They were operating according to the rationalistic philosophical tradition our society values. Throw out the faulty cake batter.

But I can say now why this view leaves so much out about what is good, about what it means to be human. Just as objectively holding that life is random hurt me down to my soul that day in my philosophy class, holding that a specific life doesn’t matter because of Down syndrome also hurts our society. We are diminished because those lives didn’t matter. Because their smiles are not here.

So how does a society break out of its bias?

By telling stories. By programs like the one at Mass General. As the philosopher Iris Murdoch says, by having a philosophy that can talk about love. She was also a novelist, and came to believe that ‘art goes deeper then philosophy’. What philosophy can’t do, a painting, a novel, a photograph can do. It can move us, it can touch our deepest selves. It can let us speak of love.

Murdoch’s idea that we need to be able to talk about love in philosophy and art gives me hope. It’s hard to talk about systematically, categorically eliminating a group of people like those with Down syndrome if we think – if we see – that are very capable of love. Love casts out fear. And if there is one main factor that leads to eliminating people with Down syndrome, it’s fear.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin did more to end slavery then any philosophical treaty, and it was born of a mother’s love. When the author Harriet Beecher Stowe lost her baby right after childbirth, she thought of the grief of slaves who were mothers and had their children forced out of their arms, and then wrote her famous book that changed society.

Writing and art can say things that were silenced in my philosophy classes – things like you matter. Your life has worth. You are loved.

So maybe the compassion that is being showed by mothers of children with Down syndrome will help people view this diagnosis differently. I am well aware that my voice is just one in a beautiful symphony happening now. And Ronan is only five months old. But I will slowly try to tell his story.

For anyone who gets a test result or a diagnosis of Down syndrome, know that it might test your faith. But you don’t need an existential moment about the meaning of life to know what to decide. You can just listen to the stories of how the mothers that chose keeping their baby had their faith rewarded with immense joy. You can see their beautiful children radiate joy. Choosing that their life matters will always be choosing joy.

How I Sleep Train

22 May, 2018/1 Comment/in Uncategorized/by Katie

Michael is sleep trained. Praise the Lord.

And what good is having a blog if you can’t shout this from the rooftops?

He is my 5th child to be sleep trained. And each time I was pressed up hard against desperation.

There is an acute edge to sleep deprivation. It is subtle, incessant, fluid, crushing. Every coping mechanism in you is sedated; everything that overwhelms you and makes you cranky and sucks patience out of you is loud. I am convinced a babies smiley-est days coincide with the hardest days of sleep deprivation because God knew we would need a light to our days.

I have historically trained our children at around 6 months. Ronan is about 2-3 weeks behind Michael on most things, and though he has always been a better sleeper than Michael, I think he is teething right now, so I will sleep train him next. I wanted to share how I did it with Michael while it is fresh because it feels like a miracle every time, and I think it could help other families. With the twins we were traveling and teething for most of their 6^thmonth, so I waited, just as the bible told me too.

Not THEE Bible.

The Sleep Training Bible.

The Sleep Easy Solution.

I know that there are a lot of methods out there, and if another method or no method works for you know that I AM THRILLED FOR YOU. I am thrilled for any way a momma can get sleep.

But when my friend Angi mentioned that her nine-month old wasn’t sleeping through the night, and that her 5 year old didn’t sleep through the night until he was 3, I gave her the quick 5 minute synopsis about how The Sleep Easy Solution works since I had just re-read the book in preparation, and she emailed me back in two weeks to tell me it worked! Her son was sleeping through the night!

So I figured I would leave that synopsis here in case it helps even one other family.

First, let me say what it is not – it is not the Ferber method. It is not cry it out, although there are small contained periods of crying that in my experience have been at the most two 10-minute crying sessions. It is not attachment parenting.

What it is: the theory that learning to fall asleep on our own is a life skill. And we can help our babies learn it by letting them try to fall asleep on their own. You can learn more about it, and get their handouts at their website, www.sleepyplanet.com.

Here it goes:

When you sleep train, you need to pick a week where you are not traveling, and you and your baby are not sick or teething or otherwise going through a big transition or milestone, such as suddenly crawling, or starting a new job or sitter. Waiting for a good week pays off, and will reduce the frustration and amount of time you spend sleep training.

The book goes through several checklists that are also available on their website: what your nightly routine should be (a bath, getting dressed in a sleep sack, reading a book, a song, a nurse or bottle feed), what needs to be in the room (blackout shades, possibly a white noise machine or humidifier, absolutely nothing in the bed/crib that is stimulating save one lovely if they need, more for older kids).

You do your routine every night for a week or so, and those nights record the times your child wakes up and how long they feed for. This is the most crucial step for me, since all my kids fed through the night out of habit, mainly because they nursed back to sleep. So my main goal in sleep training is to break them of needing to fall asleep sucking, and then also wean them of their night feeds. Other people might have other ‘sleep stealers’ as the book calls them, and they go through how to deal with each one. But for me, our main sleep stealer is night feeds.

As you are doing your routine every night during the ‘warm up’ period (as I like to call it), your baby will start to associate a bath and a book with bed time, and they will become cues that it is night time. It’s also good to try to start putting your baby down when they are drowsy but not asleep. Falling asleep on their own, without sleep aids, is ultimately the goal, and this is SO much easier to do if you catch them in that window when they are naturally drowsy. When putting them down for the night, you can pat their back or bum, sing a song, play a musical toy that is short (no crib entertainment stations), but try to walk out while they are still awake. If Michael fell asleep while nursing, I would wake him up by kissing him and saying goodnight or talking to him. Then I would lay him down in the crib. I found that each night I tried to do this our babies got better and better at learning they could rub their head back and forth to sooth themselves, or rub their hand back and forth, or scratch the sheets rhythmically. These are all great tools since it is their way to self sooth. If you have a thumb sucker, they have a great built in way to self sooth. As they get older, this often becomes rubbing a lovey or stroking the silky part of it or rubbing it across their nose. (A paci is only ok if they can reliably put it back in their mouth on their own – since the goal is for them to put themselves to sleep on their own – and if you do want to use the authors recommend to leave several in the crib).

The main goal of the warm up period is to practice putting them to sleep drowsy but not asleep, and take note of the times they wake up. You should also be filling your husband in on the plan once you’ve come up with it so you are both on the same page, and so he can be moral support to you if you are waffling in your decisions.

When you are ready to sleep train, follow the charts they have on their website, sleepyplanet.com or in the book.

The goal is to get your baby to sleep for 10-11 hours and have some sample schedules. Our goal range was 7:30-6am. They will have you write down the times they’ve been waking up in between – for Michael it was 10:30, 2, and 4:30. Then you write down how long they feed for. We had 18 minutes, 5 minutes, 5 minutes (think this is roughly equal to 6 oz, 4 oz, 4 oz of bottle feeding.).

You set your alarm for an hour before their normal wake up time. My times were: 9:30 dream feed before I went to bed, and set my alarm for 1 and 3:30. The first night you wake them up at those times and give them their feed. The next night you feed them at the same times, but shave off 1 0z or 2 minutes of nursing. The next night you shave 1 oz. or 2 min. of nursing. By the third night, I was down to one feed for 4 minutes, and the other feeds for 1 minute. Then the last night, I dropped 2 of the feeds at 1 and 3:30, and only feed him at 9:30 for 4 minutes.

If they should wake up at their old feed times, and Michael did the night we dropped them, you let them cry for 10 minutes, and then if they are still crying you go in for 30 seconds and stand in the MIDDLE of the room – halfway between the bed and the door – and say “its ok, baby, you’re fine. I love you. It’s night night time. Go back to sleep.” Or whatever loving reassuring words you want to deliver. DO NOT PICK YOUR BABY UP. DO NOT FEED THEM OR PAT THEIR BUM OR BACK OR TOUCH THEM AT ALL. DO NOT PULL BUNNY’S MUSICAL CHORD OR TURN LITTLE LAMB’S KNOB. You want to let them know you are nearby, but they are fine, and they can just go back to sleep. You want to let them know that their cries won’t result in getting cuddles or food, otherwise they will always keep crying and never give up and just go to sleep. This concept helps me make decisions in my middle of the night sleepy state. (When Michael woke up at 2:30 and his feed time was 3:30 I was like, should I just feed him early? And then I remembered this principle and thought, NO. You can’t reward a wake up and a cry with a feed. I let him cry, he was out in 8 minutes, and then I woke him an hour later at 3:30 to give him his feed.)

On our 4th night Michael cried for 10 minutes during his 2 am feed time, and I went in and reassured him, for less than 30 seconds, not touching him. When I went back to bed he cried for 8 more minutes and THAN HE WENT TO SLEEP. ON HIS OWN. This right here is the point at which he is become sleep trained. He was able to put himself back to bed.

The next night he woke up at the 2 am feed time, cried for 5-8 minutes and went back to bed. I didn’t have to get out of bed at all.

The third night, he slept from 7:30-6 with just his 9:30 dream feed.

ALLELUJIA.

Ronan woke up at 4:30 so it wasn’t as epic as it was with my other kids BUT STILL. It amazes me that it is so possible to sleep train a baby in a week! And all my other kids trained in a week as well.

If this sounds hard and complicated, it’s really not – just blindly follow what they tell you to do on their print outs. And just follow it as best you can. I’m sharing all the details in case they help someone. It’s an art not a science so don’t freak out if it doesn’t go perfectly according to plan.

There are times where illness, teething and traveling disrupt their ability to go back to sleep on their own. Usually during those times they needed me to rock them or feed them to go back to sleep and started to get used to it. When they were off track I just went back to the basics and re-did a sleep training week and it would only take 2-3 days to get back on track.

Ok, I’m going back to taking care of these sweet babies now. But I hope this is as life changing for you (if you need it!) as it has been for me.

Raves & Craves Vol. 2

25 May, 2016/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Katie

photo from Hearth and Harrow’s Etsy shop

Happy Wednesday, lovely neglected blog readers! As I mentioned in my last post, all of my writing time is going to finished my food memoir and I have been really busy with freelance work in Coastal Home Magazine and New Hampshire Magazine, so you can check me out in those publications too. But I love this space and I am loving putting all these interesting little tidbits here!

1) Just learned about these gorgeous textiles from Hearth and Harrow – so pretty, totally swooning.

2) Modern Mrs. Darcy just posted her summer reading list! I just asked friends on Snapchat for summer reading recs, and the next day I got the email that her popular summer reading post was up. Ask the universe and you shall receive.

3) I have told everyone I know about this podcast, How Seth Goin Manages His Life: Rules, Principles, Obsessions. Popular podcast show host Tim Ferris interviews Seth Goin, who is considered the father of the blog. (He was in business school/think tanks when the internet was born, and his insight into how it has affected us is so interesting.) I love that he starts off talking about cooking and books (two of my very favorite things). The biggest thing I took away from this is that even though there is a lot of ‘noise’ in our life with the internet and social media, we still need to clear the decks, be alone with our creative spark inside us, and create good content. This is always unquantifiable, since new and innovative is not quantifiable.

4) Have you heard the new Lumineers album? The first single is amazing, and the rest is too. I have it on repeat cooking, cleaning, walking, sitting outside looking at the stars.

5) Buckle up for a short story made long: I had to do laundry at the laundry mat last summer when our washing machine was broken and we were waiting for a repair man (with four kids, this pretty much equals a crisis slightly below the Cuban missile variety). While I was waiting I wandered into the Chinese food store next door. I stocked up on frozen Chinese steam buns and asian vegetables and all the makings for sushi at home. I’ve been back three times since.

And last week I discovered an Indian food store in Portsmouth. Not only is every thing SO cheap, but I have found the most delicious chutneys, pickled veggies, garlic and ginger starters, curry starters, and spices to make dishes like Biriyani and Vindaloo. It’s like a treasure chest. Plus the people who run them are so nice, it is such a pleasure to chat with them and learn from them. Moral of the story? If you have any ethnic food markets near you, make sure you pop in there. Also, there is a silver lining to washing machines breaking.

6) If you’ve read any of Anne Lamott’s books, you know she always talks about her friend Tom the Jesuit. Well, I found a video of them together, being interviewed by a few Jesuits. Love how they talk about brokenness and reaching our limits and needing God.

7) Guess who I just found on Twitter? My favorite college professor, Peter Kreeft. Ok, not that surprising considering he is a well known writer/philosophy celebrity (is there such a thing?). I was very lucky to take some classes with him at BC, and then I returned there for my Master’s in Philosophy. He has a new book that looks like a deep one.

8) I am so inspired by this clip of Melissa Kelly, James Beard award-winning chef of Primo Restaurant in Rockland, ME. I saw her present a few years ago at Harvest on the Harbor in Portland, ME. She made a dish with chicken and Hen of the Woods, and told stories about how her whole restaurant staff comes together for pig day each year. They spend the day slaughtering a pig, then using every part of it, turning it into prosciutto and sausage and cuts of meat the restaurant uses. They end with a huge feast. I just love her philosophy about honoring food.

Plus I got her cookbook signed by her, which is taking popular recipes by 1950’s newspaper star Marjorie Standish, which used a lot of convenient, processed foods like canned soup and turned them into recipes that use real ingredients, like a béchamel.) Mind. blown.

9) Don’t miss Boden’s sale that starts Friday – 30% off! And JCrew Factory is 30% with lots of cute stuff too.

Ok, off to do the homework and dinner shift. Hope you’re drinking in these May days! xoxo Katie

Raves & Craves Vol. 1

5 April, 2016/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Katie

This blog has been radio silent because I have been in a cave writing my book. It is a good thing to go into the cave, but I also love reaching out to say hello. So feel free to picture me, looking pasty white, eyes squinting from the sun that I haven’t seen in a long time (which is actually true both literally and figuratively. I am looking at you April snowstorm).

Since the work of writing is sometimes heavy lifting, I am going to keep it light here (and I forsee the need for more light blog posts ahead, hence the Vol. 1 in the title. You probably already figured that out though).

And I am also happy to share that I am planning a few Food Blog posts over on The Humble Onion. Writing about food in my memoir made me miss food blogging so much, so I am thrilled to have some time in the next few weeks while I wait to hear back on my recent draft – keep your eyes out or go over and subscribe if you want to get them in your email.

\\ First up, let’s talk about Still Writing by Dani Shapiro – you may have seen me post about it on Instagram over our winter break that I was loving reading this book. I first heard of Shapiro in a Memoir writing class that I took, and Still Writing just sounded like exactly what I needed to read to get me past the first draft of my book and it’s endless questions. Everyone needs a guide or a mentor on their journey and for this book, Shapiro was mine. She painted what my life needs to look like to write well, and it is to go into the cave and write. So I did. 3 days a week, from 9-1. She is such a nurturing, caring teacher. Pretty soon after starting her book, she was the voice in my head that coaxed out better writing.

\\ Mimi Thorisson – Voted #1 Blog for making us all have a case of life envy, I am so happy to find out she is expecting again! Both a baby and a cookbook! She makes having lots of babies and cooking beautiful food look easy. And I just picked up some French wine from the vineyards of the friend and neighbor in this post in Medoc. My local wine store has tons of wine from Mimi’s town.

\\ My Paris Kitchen – David Lebovitz is one of my favorite food writers, and his cookbook is on sale for $1.99 on Amazon for Kindle Edition. Get!

\\ This T-Shirt – is marked down from $2400 to $1200! Oops. My bad. I meant to link to this shirt. I kid you not, the first one is what came up somehow when I went to go search for the JCrew one that I just got. Who has $1200 for a T-shirt!?

\\ Moscow Mules: My husband and I got out this past weekend and I finally had one of these with apricot syrup in it, it was SO good and refreshing. Of course I had to go get the makings for them the next day (not hard, there are only three: Ginger beer, vodka, lime juice, and garnishes like lime & mint.)I also feel like I should show you this picture of one that is NOT in a copper mug so you don’t feel like you have to go out and buy them to make this. Jelly jars will work just fine:

The Ginger Beer I picked up had alternative recipes for the Mule which only involve using a flavored Vodka. Blueberry vodka + blueberries with the lime, Raspberry Vodka with Raspberries. I also saw one called the “Mexican Mule” using tequila instead of vodka, which sounds yum. I love having options, and this drink is just in time for summer, which feels like a bitter, distant memory since it snowed today.

\\ Have you seen Zootopia? We saw it as a family recently and I’ve been obsessed with this song running ever since.

\\ Whine About It by Matt Bellasai – Have you seen this show on Buzzfeed where comedian Matt Bellasai drinks wine and sits at his desk and whines about stuff? My best friend showed them to me when we were on a recent trip together and we basically cried until we had to go to the bathroom. Warning: he definitely swears and gets drunk so if that is not your thing, you may not like it. But I totally feel like it pulls out some funny, uninhibited truth at times. If you are willing to let decorum go in the name of funny, then prepare to watch them back to back, with tissues for the laughing tears and probably a glass of wine.

Ok, I am going to go for a run if it warms up a degree or two. Hope all is well in real life land for you, and I hope to see you here in blog land soon. xoxo Katie