happy thanksgiving!

i hope you all had a wonderful feasting and thanking yesterday. we certainly did. we had 7 for dinner and friends from philly came over for a huge dessert party afterward. we ate. oh we ate. and we watched the last of the mohicans together and sat outside by the fire. it was a balmy 70 degrees here but when the sun went down it cooled and was quite nice. the day started out sad because i took a nasty fall down the stairs. i am ok but very sore and bruised today. other than that it was a huge success.


this is a picture of the monkey bread i made for breakfast...yummy!


thanksgiving dinner

and today, being black friday, i heard that some anti-heroes are causing trouble at the gallery mall in philly... they believe some nonsense about the holidays being more about love than about shopping and think we shouldn't consume so much -- nothing at all, in fact, on today, the biggest shopping day of the year. crazy. who wouldn't want to wake up at 5am and join the throngs of annoyed and angry shoppers in overcrowded highways and malls? :)

well, i myself am getting my christmas decorations out. chris and i really want to participate in Advent this year. we want to try and be more creative about gifts and tradition - to try and pay more attention to the church calendar and to resist as much as we can, the usual insanity of 'made in china' and stress that are the holidays.




love.

my kids

i wanted to show you all my lovely children. at least they look lovely.

(i love how kids give their parents away so easily - i asked one little girl where her family had thanksgiving dinner and she said, "my mom said if grandma doesn't cook we're going to old country buffet")

chris and i have been talking about kids a lot lately. how we would want to parent, where we want to raise our children, the things we do and don't want them to have... and this morning's events kicked off another long discussion.

we were at mass and one couple we know (the dad is the pianist and organist) adopted 2 little boys in the last few years. beautiful, funny, very difficult little boys. the mom is so patient but i have say also frazzled. the boys are around 2 and 4, i believe. they were having a tough time sitting still and "behaving". dad was playing the organ for the church while mom had one hand around the ankle of the oldest as he was crawling down the pew to the other end (without, i might add, his pants and shoes on) and the other around the youngest as he was desperately trying to exit the pew all together. people were immediately drawn into 2 groups. those you saw smiling at the boys thought it was mildly amusing while others were visibly tense, annoyed at the distraction from their "holy" time with g-d. to those i say, what's holy if not children?

to the others, the people who simply smiled at the children and pitied the mother (i was in this camp), i say, what is wrong with us? dad is serving us at mass, mom is obviously trying to keep the boys quiet so as not to disturb anyone and we sit by and smile? i can only imagine how tired mom must be and how helpful someone sitting with them at church to help watch the boys would be. for some reason we try to ignore when someone is embarrassed or having difficulty, i suppose to spare them shame. but i had to ask myself, even in this small way, are we being the church? are single people, married people, those with children and without getting and giving the care they need?

it makes me nervous and shy but i think i will ask mom if i can sit with them to help carry the load next week.

has anyone ever seen Supernanny?
great show.

CCOP Action

so tonight some of us went to a ccop (Camden Churches Organized for People) action around the issues of violence and policing in camden. one of our community members is an organizer for ccop and so has gotten us pretty involved. there were close to 1000 people in attendance as well as the attorney general of new jersey, the chief operating officer (he acts as the primary leader in camden, not the mayor, and he is not elected) and city counsel people. the action was to propose that the camden police department gets some solid leadership (like a police chief which the department does not have) and that the department would adopt a community policing method which gives residents more control over how policing is done. after all, they live there and have quite a bit of insight on the problems and possible solutions.

sooo...of course the attorney general and coo danced around the questions but do seem to be spending more of their time on the problems in camden. she, the attorney general, had to leave early which, of course, gave the residents of camden the sense that this wasn't a priority. and i wonder if it is a priority.

one of the statistics that stuck out to me was the right now we've had 35 murders in camden...as of this week. our average over the past 5 years is 40 per year and camden has a population of about 80,000. that's very high. philadelphia, crime ridden herself, has an average of about 450 murders in a year with a polulation of 1.5 million. if camden were as populated as philly and if we continued with our murder rate we would have an average of about 725 murders a year... that's over 3500 murders in 5 years.

insane.

something else that stuck out to me was that since our meeting was on policing a lot of in uniform police officers were there... our meeting was in church. it was unsettling to see so many weapons in church.

however, i want to end on a positive note. i did take a nice long bike ride today with cheryl, my housemate, and we took some pretty pictures.

promises

so i made a promise to myself last week. i want to ride my bike at least 5 days a week to become active again and to get in shape...
i'm thankful my life is so local but it doesn't give me a chance to ride my bike much any more and i'm not great at exercising for it's own sake...only if it's a bonus on my way somewhere. sooo, i really don't want to get on that bike right now. 25 kids all day. i'm tired and my couch is so comfy...

but i made a promise.
alright, alright. i'll do it.

our house was warmed

so our party went fantastically, if i can say so myself. the food was great, the people were wonderful, and the house was definitely warmed. we had a little liturgy done by father michael to bless the rooms of our house. we had a fire in the backyard and kids everywhere.
it was a crossroads of friends from philly, neighbors, parishioners from sacred heart and fellow teachers from the school. these groups do not normally mix so it was lovely. pictures from the actual party will be posted soon-ish but for now i have a picture of our cute dog, Lucy, and one of our living room.


did anyone see the follow up 20/20 story on Camden recently? what do you think about people sending bicycles and setting up trust funds for poor kids in Camden?


love.

all the happenings...

i hope this is no indication of how much i will post - things have been busy!

over the rhine and rosie thomas was wonderful. absolutely wonderful. i rarely go to shows anymore but this was so worth the ticket price (and the parking ticket...oops). beautiful is all i can say. except that rosie was hilarious as usual. incredible - the range of sounds that come out of her.

tomorrow is our housewarming party, finally, after a year of living in this house. i'm so glad that we've created a home here. it feels warm and comfortable and right. but, i should confess, it can be too easy to stay here and not venture out. i guess no matter where we live we create our zones of numb comfort. ours sure is pretty.