Prayers for Jen Fulwiler and her new baby boy!

Jen Fulwiler of Conversion Diary and “Minor Revisions” fame had her sweet baby boy last night!  Her entire pregnancy has been an enormous ordeal — first a pulmonary embolism landed her in the hospital with lungs so clogged with blood clots, the doctors said she ought to be dead.  Then she had to endure a horrible planned procedure which . . . I don’t even know what to say.  I feel like that lady who had her baby in a tree during the Mozambique flooding would feel sorry for her.

So the baby was born!  But Jen says:

Unfortunately, he has some breathing problems (unrelated to my medical issues) that mean that he requires NICU care, and is now being transferred to a NICU at a different hospital with better facilities. Even more unfortunately, I have to stay here at the delivery hospital until we get my blood thinners under control. I haven’t even seen him that much since he’s been born.

Hallie keeps sending me encouraging texts telling me I’m being so strong. I’ve been meaning to follow up and ask her for some examples of what “not being strong at all” would look like. Because I’m pretty sure that that’s what I’m actually doing.

Needless to say, this is a stressful situation for all involved, so we appreciate any prayers you can offer. Thanks again for all your wonderful support.

Beautiful pic of the siblings meeting their new brother on Jen’s blog.

Please pray for quick healing for both of them, and for a speedy reunion!

Start your week off right . . .

by being a good citizen and doing something super easy to protect religious freedom.  Today is the last day to submit public comment on the new “proposed rule” for the HHS Mandate.

As you must have heard a blillion times by now, the mandate would require employers to provide health insurance coverage for contraception, sterilization and abortifacient drugs.  You have probably heard that the administration has altered the law and made a compromise that fixes the problem.

Well, they haven’t.  It doesn’t.  If you go to this page which gives you a VERY, VERY EASY way to submit a public comment, you will see a fact sheet from the USCCB at the bottom which explains why the fix is no fix.  Basically, if you’re the owner of Our Blessed Lady’s Catholic McCatholicy Home for Catholic Catholics and Rosary Giveaways to Catholics, you will still be required to pay for your secretary’s sterilization and her ten-year-old daughter’s “education” about where she can find the morning after pill.  This is how they fixed it for us.

The government is basically telling the people they’re only allowed to be Catholic when they’re actually inside the Church building.  Even if you’re not religious, that should make you very afraid!  Go here to let the administration know that the mandate is still unacceptable, still a flagrant violation of our religious freedom.

And now, once you’ve done the right thing and added your public comment, which is very easy to do and takes like forty seconds, here is your video to start the rest of your Monday off right (and yes, there is a tie-in, but it’s so flimsy I’m just going to let it go):

7 Humiliatingly Slow Takes with Huffing and Puffing Afterward

1.  I don’t know how successfully I’ve hidden this in the few photos of myself that I’ve put online, but I am 5’5″ and in the last fifteen years, I’ve put on average of seven pounds of permanent weight for each baby.  This is what happens when all you do is sit down.

2.  I was having stabbing pain, excruciating burning from my lower back down to my toes, tingling, numbness, and general unpredictable sciatic misery, which finally sent me to the doctor, because I couldn’t believe that I could become that debilitated just from doing nothing.  The x-ray revealed that I have “mild to moderate degeneration” between the discs of my spine, brought on by age, weight gain, and inactivity, or, in layman’s terms, being a loser.  I am adding that phrase,  “mild to moderate degeneration,” to my list of possible new names for the new blog I’ll never start.  Other possibilities I’ve gathered over the years include what Mark Shea called me one time (“History’s Greatest Monster”), what an outraged reader told my editor (“Fisher Is Unrepentant!”), and what my mechanic wrote about the van (“Misfires Badly Under Any Significant Load”).

3.  A sad little drama recently played out in a shopping plaza nearby.  First there was nothing but a Curves Gym.  Then Five Guys Burger and Fries moved in next door.  Curves held out for a while, but one day the windows went dark, and they packed up and moved away, presumably shaking their chubby fists in rage, with an embarrassing amount of flappy movement around the upper arm area, as they went.  And then, in the space where Curves used to be, Rick’s Gourmet Ice Cream moved in.

4.  This is not going to become one of those tedious blogs that does nothing but record how many reps or grams or kilos or whatever (wait, I think I’m talking about cocaine now) of cardio I accomplished and which variety of kale I like to add to my puke smoothie.  (Sorry, I just friggin hate the whole smoothie thing.  You still have teeth, people.  Use ‘em.)  I will try not to make a big deal out of it unless I think it would be genuinely interesting to someone besides myself and my doctor.

5.  I picked out an exercise DVD that looked like a reasonable place to start.  Today, I did it for the first time, and had two shocks:  one is that it’s designed for senior citizens; and two, it wasn’t easy to keep up.  Argh.  Yep, ol’ Jane Fonda is going on and on about her titanium hip and how great it is that we’re doing so much to combat memory loss, and I’m screaming on the inside “ISN’T TWENTY MINUTES UP YET, YOU HOLLOW CHEEKED BITCH?”

6.  I used to be able to run five miles.  Cursing the whole way, but still, I used to be able to do it.  Now, I can’t even curse for five miles straight, running or not.  I don’t even have profanity stamina anymore.

7.  In the week that has passed since I wrote #1-6, I have put off reading what Pope Francis said about people who complain about 73 distinct times. Because look,  I got the flu, which meant that I was too weak and feverish to do my back exercises, which meant that I couldn’t sleep because of back pain, which meant that the baby decided this would be a fine time to give up sleeping.  Like, just quit, flat out.  She goes to bed at the normal time, but wakes up at 1:30, ready to play.  The next two hours are spent with constructive thoughts like, “WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME” and “HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FUNCTION” and “I THINK I HAVE TWO FRIENDS NAMED LYDIA BUT MAYBE ONLY ONE I’M NOT SURE ABOUT THAT BECAUSE THERE IS THAT ONE LYDIA BUT THEN THERE IS THAT OTHER ONE ALSO AND THAT MAKES TWO BUT ON THE OTHER HAND I’M NOT SURE HOW MANY FRIENDS I HAVE NAMED LYDIA.”  (See, fever.)  Then I went to throw up, but my back hurt too much to reach the toilet.  Also, I took a shower and it turned out the soap had a bug on it, and I was washing myself with bug.

And THAT’S why I say sometimes it’s okay to just go through your medicine chest and see what you can find.  Because, sheesh.

For someone with real problems, NOT brought on by being a loser, check out our 7 Quick Takes host, Jen Fulwiler.

Is Outrage

I just tried to read Pope Francis, Say Yes to the Pill on National Review Online.  I guess it’s an insightful tour de force about how it’s time for the Church to get with the times and whatnot.  Doesn’t bother me that someone is saying this, because everyone says it.  Doesn’t bother me that it’s on National Review, because National Reviewwent down the toilet about a decade ago, and only serves to remind me of why I’m not a Republican anymore.

But it does bother me, a lot, that someone would write the following:

The sex-abuse crisis has been a horrible and shaming problem, but Catholicism’s enemies have amplified and exploited it to incite the inference that most of the Roman clergy are deviates compounding superstition with perversion. The most frequent and wishful version of these events is as a mighty coruscation before the great Christian scam expires in a Wagnerian inferno, an inadvertent Waco. It took the most antagonistic pundits, in their uncomprehending skepticism of the viability of what they regard as a medieval flimflam factory anyway, only one day to assimilate the election of a man none of them had mentioned, in their omniscience, as a contender, before pronouncing his papacy dead on arrival at the Sistine Chapel.

and still be considered a writer.  Coruscation?  Uncomprehending skepticism of the viability of what they regard as a medieval flimflam factory?  I’m sorry, has someone checked in on this guy lately?  I think he’s having a stroke.

If anybody has the strength to wade through both pages of this masturbatory mess, please let me know what it’s about.  Furthermore, circumstantial evidentiary horticulture would presume,  one would cogitate, an obstreperous de-regimentation of, if you will, unregurgitated foofaraw, if you know what I mean.

Book review: Erin Manning’s _The Telmaj_

 Oh, I forgot!  My 13-year-old daughter wrote a book review of Erin Manning’s new YA book,  The Telmaj.
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EM:  I’ve targeted the intermediate children’s fiction market, which encompasses readers ages 8-12, approximately. I think this market is under-served, especially when readers that age are looking for imaginative fiction like sci-fi.

Unfortunately, a lot of the attention is paid to the YA market of slightly older readers–but many kids in the 8-12 age range just aren’t ready for the sheer amount of graphic sex and violence on the YA shelf. I want to reach kids who’ve already read the Narnia series, perhaps, and want exciting stories, but who aren’t interested in the love life of sparkly vampires or teen zombies.

LarryD:  Yes, I noticed the lack of vampires, werewolves and pouty teen angst.

Later in the interview, Erin says:

 I initially thought about getting The Telmaj published by a Catholic fiction publisher because even though the book is not overtly Catholic I wanted to tell a story full of good and evil, right and wrong, and the kinds of virtues and values that seem to be sadly lacking in many children’s books these days. But the publisher I sent it to, while thinking it was very publishable, explained that she couldn’t publish anything but overtly Catholic fiction–that is, fiction that would show Catholic characters going to Catholic schools and Mass on Sunday, that sort of thing.

While I understood that, I think we’re reaching a point where even trying to tell a story in which characters struggle to do the right thing and have no trouble identifying certain evils really is writing Catholic fiction of a type. So many books, even for children, rely on a kind of “situational ethics” where whatever the characters we like do is good, and whatever the characters we don’t like are doing must be bad (unless they, too, are just the victims in all this). Sort of like how we view political parties these days.

I’m old-fashioned enough to think that for children, the reinforcement of the ideas of good and evil is a good thing to do–not in a cartoonishly simple way, but in a way that helps them ponder these kinds of questions.

 Hear, hear!  And here is my daughter’s short (and kind of adorable) review of the book:
 The Telmaj is, quite bluntly and frankly, a really good book. It was a little hard to get into, but once it got going I was captivated. It’s about a person named Smijj. (Another thing I really like about the book, is that I can actually pronounce the names of the people in the story. That does not happen a lot when I read Sci-Fi.) Anyway, Smijj is living on a planet no one really seems to care about. He is alone, jobless, and struggling to make an honest living, when opportunity arises. A space ship crew hires him to unload their cargo, and he is soon a part of their crew, and on his way to finding out who he is and why he has the ability to wish himself away to anywhere he wants. I recommend it to anyone who likes Science Fiction and Fantasy, or has an interest in space ships.
Erin expects the sequel to be out in May, and two more installments are in the works.

Start your week off right . . .

with a little comeuppance.

Now pretend the silver cowboy is Pope Francis, and the guy in the purple shirt is saying, “Um, scuze me, let me tell you what true humility is like!  Um, Your Holiness, don’t you realize that there’s no possible way to lead the Church when you’re not in ermine?  Um, Frankie-boy, whatcha doing washing the feet of women, huh, huh?  You do realize you’re bringing about the ruin of Christendom, right?  Now if you’d just read this blog post I wrote, you’ll see the error of your ways . . .”

Feel better, dontcha?  And now back to Lent.

Her Latin’s a little shaky, but . . .

 

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Start your week off right . . .

with the inestimable Betty Butterfield recounting her experience at St. Assisi Francentine:

It had a lot of flow to it, but a lot of it caught me off guard.

Happy birthday, Ezra Jack Keats!

If you can believe it, his very first book was the exquisite The Snowy Day

I love the sense of quiet alertness conveyed with those blocks of color,

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love that giant Mama,

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love the simple portraits of the little sorrows and the great joys of childhood.

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This was one of the first children’s books about a black kid.

More seasonable, another of my favorites illustrated by Ezra Jack Keats is Over in the Meadow:

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My favorite counting song, so cozy and satisfying, and the pictures are intense and unforgettable.

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Happy birthday, Ezra Jack Keats!   Thanks for all the colors.

Start your week off right . . .

with some Willie Frickin Nelson!

“There’s more old drunks than there are old doctors, so I guess we better have another round.”  Also, songwriters take note:  two minutes, forty-one seconds, the end.  That’s how you do it.