A reader asks for recommendations on Catholic Dad blogs. I read lots of blogs written by catholic guys with children, but nothing that’s specifically a Dad Blog. Any suggestions?
Author: JenniferFitz
Immersed.
There’s a blog in my head that is chock full of posts. A few of them will soon escape into the internet.
Working on a booklet for catechists, and have gotten some good feedback and helpful edits from my beta-readers. I would like to point out that if you ever write something really stupid, Dorian Speed has your back. THANK YOU DORIAN. Also got my first back-cover blurb quote, from Sarah Reinhard: “I NEED this book.” Heartening, very heartening.
This week on the calendar:
School. It’s going well. Yay!
First Night of CCD. This Wednesday. Wrote up class plans today. Need to get the classroom set up and materials in order. Stoked about my new helper / co-catechist, think it’s going to be a good match for the class.
Edits. Turning booklet from a 2nd draft into a 3rd draft, with help from some kind readers. Hope to have that done by the end of the week, and ready to send to the next set of readers.
Theology of the Body for Teens book review. Am plugging through that, really liking what I see. Top notch so far. My DRE is being very patient with me as I take forever to finish reading and previewing; I think mostly because buying it herself is not in the budget, so she’s scrambling to see what other parish wants to lend us materials. Thank you Catholic Company for helping keep the budget under control.
Ever heard of Dan Castell? He’s making us laugh. Mr. Boy is happily plowing through a draft manuscript as a beta-reader, and not just because I’ll excuse him from a week of National Catholic Reader assignments. Dr. Boli fans should watch this space. Some day I don’t know when, a finished work will emerge from Dan’s writing cave. Good stuff. Real gift for repartee.
And then all the usual stuff like cooking and cleaning and driving children places and gee, wow, laundry. I think maybe changing clothes is overrated.
Fundraising Bleg – Family Honor
Catching up on e-mails tonight, and found this in my box. Whenever someone asks me about catholic sex-ed, I send them to Family Honor. These are good folks who stepped in to fill a moral vacuum in catechesis, way back when no one else was willing or able. If you’ve benefited from one of their classes, workshops, conferences or publications over the years, consider taking a minute to send a thank-you contribution:
Dear Friend of Family Honor:
You are receiving this e-mail as a friend of our organization. We need your help. We have hit a cash flow crunch that is having a significant effect on our staff. They are loyally working away at half pay and even that will be interrupted.
We have assembled a real “A Team” of staff and consultants over the last year to help implement our vision of putting Family Honor in every diocese in the country. Great strides have been made thus far: we have significant, new alliances with Catholic bishops and lay leadership around the country; we have added an affiliate in Ohio; our executive director and other guests are being interviewed regularly via Catholic media (our executive director will be a guest of Father Mitch Pacwa on EWTN Live this month); our parent-child programs are in the process of being updated and streamlined; and staff has been planning new ways of reaching even more parents. We also have many fund development efforts underway. Ironically, however, much of those fund development efforts will not bear fruit until at least the first of the year.
Excluding project driven efforts, which are covered by specific grants or donations, it takes about $25,000 a month to operate Family Honor’s home office. Our parent-child programs are essentially revenue neutral.
Can you help? In the short term, we need $15,000 by the 15th of September. We would also appreciate pledge commitments over the next few months. Please feel free to forward this e-mail to those who you think may be able to provide a donation to Family Honor. You can donate via the secure Family Honor web site at www.familyhonor.org or you can drop a check to our office:
Family Honor
Attn: Brenda Cerkez
2927 Devine Street, Suite 130
Columbia, SC 29205
Whatever you can do will help. Thank you very much.
Sincerely,
J Cabot Seth
Family Honor Chairman of the Board
803.773.8676
Weekend Reading
Courtesy of The Catholic Company Reviewer Program, I’m curling up this weekend with The Theology of the Body for Teens – Middle School Edition. So far so good. I’m halfway through the student and parent books, have not yet viewed the DVD’s. I’ll post my own review in the next week or so, and then will be passing on the bundle-o-curriculum to my DRE. Might be able to get some opinions from her and our youth minister to share with you as well.
–> Our parish elementary and middle/high school religious ed programs are on separate nights. Which means many family members of middle schoolers are loitering around the education building on a night when the middle school kids do not have class. This course looks like one that would make a great stand-alone program to offer during that time. We’ll see.
Catholic Writers’ Retreat – Oct. 5-9, DeWitt, Michigan
Ann Lewis of CWG fame requests we spread the word about the Guild’s upcoming writers’ retreat, which is not for guild members only!:
Our next big event is Your Word is My Delight: Catholic Writers Retreat – October 5-9, 2011 at the St. Francis Retreat Center in DeWitt, Michigan. I did send out a separate e-mailing on this event, so many of you have this information, but I want to reiterate that it looks to be a fantastic experience that is different from our writers conferences. With this retreat, we’ll work on our souls, contemplate God’s calling to us as writers and grow as writers through one-on-one critique sessions. And, because this is a writers retreat, you will be given a lot of time to just write! Please consider coming, and pass on this information to those you think might be interested. Post it on your blogs, twitter and facebook. If we don’t get more registrations for this event quickly, it may have to be canceled and we’d hate for that to happen.
Looks like a good event. Check it out.
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And spread the word. You don’t have to be a member of the guild, or even really be entirely certain about the existence of “Michigan” — though I have it from seemingly reliable witnesses that the place is real.
The CWG provides writing support to writers of all abilities and interests. Although the most expensive events do have an admission fee to cover costs, the guild runs top-notch educational events online at no charge, that are open to anyone at all. Great catholic and catholic-friendly books are being written and published today in part because of the help of the CWG along the way. If you like to read, the CWG is your friend. And it’s very easy to post a link to Ann’s announcement on your blog or page, so that your Michigan-area reader(s) can find out about a retreat that might be just what they need.
And then they will be like me, forever grateful to the person who posted a blurb about a CWG event on her blog, and introduced me to a whole wonderful world I never would have discovered.
“But I am not that attractive . . .”
I was in a private conversation with a young woman a few years ago, and the topic was modesty. No, she told me, she didn’t think outfit she had shown me was a problem. Her reasoning?
I’m not that attractive.
She meant it.
Let me tell you, she was and is BEAUTIFUL. I don’t just mean “all young women have a special inner beauty of their own if they just let it shine blah blah blah.” I mean like, Wow! Gorgeous!
–> One thing Jon and I discovered when we quit watching TV many years ago, is that our sense of beauty readjusted. Our brains no longer held up some kind of fake, air-brushed perfect standard as the model to which all humans must be compared. It is a kind of freedom.
Girls today are not growing up in my little cave of normalcy. They are surrounded by images everywhere of Perfect People. Those people are pretend. They are fake. They are like the hamburger in the picture on the menu at the fast food restaurant.
But here’s the thing about modesty: Men are perfectly happy with regular hamburgers. They don’t need it all fluffed and shellacked and with lettuce and onions hanging out just right to show off what’s inside. Maybe you have to photograph a hamburger just right to sell it to a girl. But all you have to do is say, “Hey, hamburgers!” and the guys will line up.
Really.
Girls, even if you aren’t super gorgeous, guys are THAT interested in you, just because you are a girl. You! Yes, you! You don’t need to “sell” yourself. You don’t need to put your every asset on display. Be a kind, friendly person who cares about others. That’s what real men are looking for in a wife.
PS: Betty Beguiles comes well-recommended, if you are looking for fashion ideas that show off the best you, without showing off more of you than needs to be public. Thank you to the Dorian/Bearing blogging powerhouse for their regular reminders that I really need to subscribe.
[And if you make a point of not showing off your body, you’ll eliminate from the field all the jerky dogs who are only interested in that, and who will drop you in ten years if you don’t stay perfect enough. You don’t need that. Do you have ten years to waste, and no desire to find a guy who loves you for YOU? No. Use the power of clothing to cull the field of the losers.]
Fr. Z Poll Bleg
As requested. Go vote. The topic is “Does an all-male sanctuary foster vocations to the priesthood?”
The results (given that this is Fr. Z’s blog) are unsurprising. But vote anyway.
[I voted yes. FYI I have a daughter who loves serving at the altar, and as long as my pastor is good with it, I’m good with it. My parish has about half and half boys & girls serving. Last time the secretary counted, she said it was more boys than girls. But my intuition is that a mixed server-corps encourages vocations to the sacrament of matrimony. I could be wrong. H/T to Sr. Meris the New Nun, who used to be an altar server.]
Saturday Linkfest
I’ve got another episode from the Homeschool Photo Contest to post, but am waiting for just the right time. Ha. Meanwhile, here’s how you should goof on instead:
1. Read this article from the Apparent Project on Why You Should Not Mail Peanut Butter to Haiti. No, really, take it out of the bubble-wrapped package and eat it yourself. Haiti thanks you. Because it turns out that shipping bunches of free stuff to impoverished countries undermines local businesses. That make peanut butter. Or would, if only Haitians weren’t getting boxes of the stuff from other countries. Go read.
2. A longtime friend, engineer, amateur gunsmith, and EMT, sent us this YouTube video on Gun Safety. PG WARNING: If your head is screwed on straight, there’s at least one scene that is objectionable even for comedy noir. It also means you aren’t the target audience. [Hint: If you have given up watching action-adventure shows because all the egregious gun safety violations– by law enforcement good guy characters no less!!– have caused you to throw your tv out the window, you aren’t actually the target audience for this clip.] But it is funny. With proper parental guidance as required.
3. Look, Sarah Reinhard one of my favorite writing friends, has a new book out:
She let me look at one of the later drafts, and it is a really nice little book. If you are looking for a family-friendly Advent Book, I’d give it a recommend. From what I recall, it is protestant-friendly. But just e-mail her and ask if you have any questions or concerns, she is one of those extroverted writers who likes to talk to readers. Or leave a comment in her blog combox. She’s totally chatty. Super Nice Person. Happy to talk about her books any day.
4. And is just me, or does it look like the new John McNichol book is now out on Amazon?
Serious coolness.
Not for people who don’t read genre fiction. But highly recommended if you are looking for fun, readable Catholic GKC Sci-Fi Alternate History goodness in a package your boy will enjoy. Do you know of a different book that will cause an 11-year-old boy to beg to read Huck Finn? Maybe you do. Or maybe you think that no day is complete without the threat of an alien attack. In which case, McNichol is your man.
Be Modest at Church in Four Easy Steps
This topic has been in my head for a while, and I was waiting for fall so no one would be embarrassed. But this article here got my attention, courtesy of I think maybe Fr. Z or the Pulp.it or maybe both — primarily thanks to my being wound up late at night and goofing off.
What I see at Mass — and of course out in the wider world — is that a lot of really good Catholics don’t have a clue about modesty. These are super wonderful people. Kind, pious, regular mass-goers who are living out the Christian life day after day. And honestly? They are trying to be modest.
–> My experience is that the people who struggle most in the two-few-clothes department are the more pure among us. It doesn’t occur to them just how weak their fellows can be. It’s like putting out giant trays of brownies because it just never occurs to you that some people will be tempted to eat too many. (But some of us? Yes we will be.)
***
But our culture’s at the point where vendors of athletic clothing think nothing of mailing out catalogs with ladies in their bras on the cover. And not a sports bra. I mean, underwear-underwear, done pin-up style.
[Hint to businesses: If my son has to carry in a picture of a seductively-posed almost-naked lady from the mailbox, I am never buying your products again. Did I say that clearly enough?]
And that was the event today that made me decide it was time to share the Four Easy Steps. Because when you live in a world where everybody everywhere is forgetting to put their clothes on, it’s really hard to know what’s modest and what’s not. And all the great essays about “Put on your clothes! But it’s really about internal holiness and don’t be judgmental!” don’t really help, if no one will tell you which clothes you are missing.
So here you go, Four Easy Steps for Dressing Modestly at Mass:
- Cover your shoulders.
- Cover your knees.
- Don’t show any cleavage.
- Tailored is good, tight is bad.
And that’s it. Follow those rules, and you will have to really goof it up to not be wearing enough clothes.
Now for some clarifications. Consider this the advanced course:
1. Actually I don’t think bare shoulders are always and everywhere a near occasion to sin. Witness what I wore to my dad’s wedding, and what my own daughters wore last May for the crowning of the Blessed Mother. This can be done modestly, or modestly-enough. Lots of not-immodest sleeveless outfits at my church. But it is so, so easy to go wrong. And it’s just not worth agonizing over. Put on a little sweater and you know you’re good. Buy something with sleeves, you’re good. Why argue about strap thickness when it so, so easy to just be sure?
UPDATED to point you to a quote in the combox. A reader asked about sleeve length. I gave it my guess, and then asked the guys for an opinion. Christian LeBlanc came to the rescue with his usual no-nonsense analysis:
Short or long sleeves, either is ok.
No sleeves starts to distract. Thin straps/ bare shoulders/ bare backs distract more.
It has to do with the amount of skin, I think, even though the skin exposed is basically mundane.
–> So there you go. Not just me makin’ things up to repress the masses. Guys notice this stuff. Be kind to them. They are trying to pray.
(And anway, you know you are freezing at church. They set the A/C so that poor man saying Mass in all those vestments on a 105 degree day doesn’t fall over.)
2. Ditto for knees. I did a quick look-around the last couple weeks, and sure enough, there are tons of ladies at my parish wearing just-above-the-knee skirts that were perfectly modest. The trouble is this: It’s really hard for the modern-media-saturated brain to distinguish between the skirt that is long enough, and the one that is not. Who runs around with a ruler in hand, figuring out the perfect modesty formula? Knees, on the other hand . . . almost everyone has knees. They are easy to identify, so you can tell right away whether they are visible or not.
–> Once again, this is a rule I don’t always follow. (See “Dad’s wedding” above. Plus of course in regular outside-of-Mass life, I wear shorts. It’s summer. Shorts. Summer. Shorts. They go together.) But you know, I’d be willing to sacrifice an outfit or two, in my fictional world where parishes made dress codes, if it meant my son doesn’t have to look at swimsuit models at church. Cover the knees at Mass and it’s hard to go wrong.
3. Cleavage. Cover. The. Cleavage. Do you know what that part of your body is for? It is for feeding your baby. Do you know that when you walk into Mass with those girls on display, it makes nursing babies and toddlers hungry? And it attracts other attention as well. Do you honestly want people salivating at the sight of you? As in, actual drool? Are you ready to feed the masses to whom you are advertising? No. Save it for your own baby.
This is a rule for 100% of the time, everywhere you go. Fabric is your friend. Cover the cleavage.
[Perfectly fine to be actually feeding a person during Mass. If that person if your offspring, not yet to the age of reason. Good, holy, necessary thing to do. With the cleavage covered.]
4. Tailored yes, tight, no. This is another pretty firm rule. Okay, so my daughters were telling me today that my t-shirt was tight, and I promise it was not, but, you know there’s a few decades there where the ol’ body stockpiles emergency calories just in case, and so yeah, there is a certain subgroup for whom staying ahead of the fitted-versus-tight curve is kind of a challenge. I suppose we need to fast more. But even with that allowance made, yes there should be some measurable amount of air between your body and your outer garments.
These aren’t rules for all time. These are rules that work for 2011 in most parishes in the United States. They err on the conservative side, not because I think you need to be extra-conservative, but just to make things really silly easy.
If you are currently wearing not that many clothes to Mass, give them a try. You can say some lady on the internet dared you do it.
You’ll be more comfortable indoors when the A/C is set too high, but you won’t be too hot standing outside on the patio after Mass, chatting with your friends. You’ll attract the attention of the kinds of men and boys you actually want to meet. The ones who care about you, and see you as a real live person, not just as a pin-up model or an underwear catalog. Mothers of teenage sons will thank you.
Try it. What can it hurt?
Homeschool Photos Episode 1: Organization
Now for the personal tour, divided up by theme. We are five days down, 175 to go, so homeschooling is pretty much all I think about right now. I am not a naturally organized person, but through a series of miracles, I think I finally have something that works. This is what it looks like.
1. This is my office. Those shelves contain my books, including course plans not in use and all the solutions manuals. Also contains school books that I don’t want kids getting into, either because of replacement cost or a very-PG rating.
Squint at the desk on the right, and you’ll see this:
It took me, oh, you know maybe TWENTY YEARS to figure out I needed a desk-top file box. There’s a file in there for any kinds of papers I need to either access quickly or file frequently: phone number lists, activity calendars, kids’ current-year school portfolios, and an assortment of other odds and ends for me personally. (SuperHusband gets the other desk.)
The bulletin board behind the desk is for near-term papers I need in my face. Last week it held a copy of the girls’ party invitation. Right now it has the announcement for the local catechist training seminar coming up. I like it empty.
Sitting on the desk is my personal calendar, week-at-glance. I take it with me whereever I go, or else I am very very sorry I did not. (Did I lose your phone number that you wrote on the church bulletin? See? I should have brought the pink book.) Also, I always regret it if I don’t look at the calender every morning. But a lot of mornings I don’t. And then I regret it.
3. This is the freezer door, and behind it lie the wonders of science. But on the surface is the more pressing homeschooling need, the calendars everyone else looks at. I put the week’s activities on the dry-erase board, and then use empty squares to write in items for the grocery list as needs are made known.
[I used to keep this on the wall behind my desk. And I never used it, because it was awkward to write on. Then I saw one just like it at my friend Judy’s house, only she used hers. Because it was on her freezer.]
The tiny strip of bulletin board holds up a monthly calendar, which I update every now and again when we need to figure out whether we are free for this or that. It also holds important papers such as the list of meals for the week (torn off from the paper grocery list I took to the store), and the list of lost homebrewing supplies we would dearly like to find again. Behind the monthly calendar, on their own tacks, are the church youth group activity calendar and the altar-server schedule, since both of those I need to actually look at pretty often.
Also on the freezer is a little metal organizer that holds dry-erase markers, the dog’s thyroid medicine, and bills that need to be paid. [All the other pet meds are on top of the freezer, and I finally got smart today and put them in a big ziplock bag so they wouldn’t fall off the freezer and dissappear forever. They could still fall off, but they’ll do it in giant blob that won’t slip into the dusty communal grave of Things That Got Kicked Under the Fridge.]
4. This year I made a little zone in the living room for all the kids’ current-year school books. So they are all in one place. In previous years I let certain children keep their books on their desks in their rooms. Bad idea. Recipe for lost books.
On the top shelf you see a milk crate for each big kid. All their books plus a binder with the quarter’s course plans, daily grading sheet, and a dry-erasable daily checklist they can choose to use or not, go in that box. Nearby (you’ll see it in a future episode maybe) is the chair where I sit to issue and grade homework. A kid stands by that chair and delivers to me the book & work I request, and puts back what I’m done with. So far, 5 days into the year, that process is working great, except that I need to make a box for the solutions manuals so I can haul them into the living room with me. It turns out I don’t actually know that much Latin.
Top shelf of the wooden bookcase contains library books, a box with blank penmanship worksheets (kids just choose whatever they want for that day from what is in the box — they all write about the same, I know), and the five-year-old’s “workbox”. That means her basket of activity books to do school-y stuff with when she is bored waiting on me to work with her.
Middle shelf has two little girls’ real school books, plus frequently-referenced extra books, like the dictionary. And whatever else the kids randomly put away there.
Bottom shelf has the 2nd grader’s workbox and more related-but-not-required books. All kids are studying Ancient Rome / Ancient Civilizations, so those types of books from our family library are there right now, and American History (so last year) are off on a different set of shelves elsewhere.
To left of the shelves are the Math Drawers. Bottom drawer contains math activities (thank you Laura B.!), top drawer contains upper-grades math manipulatives for fractions and algebra. Or something. The big box on the top has containers with little Units and Tens blocks, and then a stack of Hundreds blocks. Except that everyone seems to be doing math in my bedroom, which means many of the blocks have now found a home on top of the old ice chest by my bedroom door.
Way up on top of the milk crates are the good school books that the kids don’t need yet, but belong in the pile of current-year books, and I don’t want anybody touching them. But I want to remember where they are, because soon, very soon, some child will need them.