The Seven Year Tour

Well, it's that blogaversary time of year again, and since Studeo is now officially "alive" again, I thought it would be fun to take you (and really myself) on a little tour of some favorite moments from the last seven years. It's really been so long since I've dug through the archives that this will be a bit of  a journey of discovery for me as well - I really don't have a clear sense of exactly what I will find. :)

And, by the way, I've been meaning to mention that I've spent a bit of time on my various pages that can be found along the top bar of the blog - especially the favorites section. So feel free to take a peek (though they are, of course, always a work in progress).

So here we go...

I Start Blogging...


I didn't start reading blogs until right around the death of Pope John Paul II, when I was interested in all of the personal thoughts and tributes that people were writing about him. It was especially following my sister's original blog that inspired me to make the leap. And I really, honestly, remember thinking that no one would read my blog and I that would like to keep it anonymous (thus I even have that still present nickname for myself - Love2learn Mom), but I thought that I would enjoy writing it. I still don't like trying to follow the unwritten "rules" of blogging. As I mentioned in my very first post:

I'm very talented at starting notebooks with thoughts, comments from reading, etc.; dutifully commenting in these for a few days and getting sidetracked for awhile before starting the process once again. Here I will attempt to "collect my thoughts" at least all in one place, if not more consistently.

And I still really do believe that writing brings clarity. And so, for me, this blog has never been so much a place to "teach" as a place to "think" and also, of course "remember".

We had fun coming up with blog pseudonyms for all of the kids. At the time this blog started they were the following ages: Ria (11), Gus (9), Terri (7), Bernie (5), Kate (3) and Frank (1). And that's just because I happened to start the blog during the short few months in which their ages line up rather nicely. Now Ria is finishing up her freshman year at Thomas Aquinas College and Frank is just about to receive his First Communion.

One of my earliest posts was about the election of Pope Benedict XVI. I was reminded of this post (which focuses on a Mass at Holy Hill said by Archbishop Timothy Dolan) just this past weekend because Cardinal Dolan came back to Milwaukee and said a Mass at Holy Hill (which we were unfortunately unable to attend - but watched streaming online). Anyway, the original post is:

My Children and the Papal Conclave

Family "History" Preserved...

 It's fun to stumble on little bit's of our family's "history" that ended up avalanching into more and more things over the years. For example, in this post, I wrote about reading Chesterton's "The Ballad of the White Horse" aloud to Ria. And later you can find (though the photo is currently missing) a reference to Ria reciting a long portion of "the Ballad of the White Horse" from memory at the American Chesterton Society Conference in Minnesota.

Some Actual Studying Took Place...

The blog title "Studeo" is Latin for "I Study", but also seemed like a fun play on words, doubling for a place set aside for working on things. The unofficial subtitle (sometimes found in the header photo and sometimes not) has always been "My Thinking Spot" (with gratitude to A.A. Milne). And so a lot of my posts have been about ideas I've been working on understanding (and generally heavy on quotes, and even jokes, that I found helpful). Here's a pretty typical example:

Discerning God's Will

Funny Business...

One of my favorite things in retrospect about blogging is how much of the funny things my kids have said over the years have been preserved. Several years we made little photos books for the grandparents for Christmas that were sprinkled with funny kiddie quotes that were easy to pick up right from the blog. In fact, I have dozens of funny and cute posts to be found under the label kiddie quotes and we had a special category, just for Frank's quotes called Frankly Speaking.

Here are a couple of favorites:

Frankly Speaking on Religion (Kate and Frank were 8 and 6 at this point)

Frank Fashions

Frankly Speaking: Defining Terms

About Town with Frank

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words...

 With a little help from the wonders of Flickr (who make it look so easy!), we've always had a lot of family and fun photos as part of this blog. So I wrap up this tour with a totally random selection of photos from blog posts (and a few Studeo headers) over the years (made much simpler with Blogger's nice feature for selecting photos from within the blog). Thanks for stopping by!

Philosophy of Living in Right Relation to Others

(One of those messy, half-baked sort of posts - this comes from an old piece of paper that I'd like to toss):

Docility/ Openness to Friendly Criticism (includes taking your ideas lightly)

The Virtue of Life - aspiring to look upon others through God's eyes (being aware of what we value people for and the danger of de-humanizing them cf. The Anatomy of Peace by the Arbinger Institute)

Test everything, hold fast to what is good.

Rejoice in the Good.

Cultivating an atmosphere of appreciation.

Learning how to fight well - especially find resolution and not attack the person.

Meeting people where they are. - "The truth must dazzle gradually".

Perspective (you can be so wrong even while being technically right).

Know thine enemy. (cf. Hunger Games)

Train Ride Down the Coast

320 degree horseshoe curve (that's the front of *our* train), a photo by Chez VH on Flickr.

Last month I spent a week in California visiting a friend in Northern California and my daughter in college in Southern California. I flew in to San Francisco, took a train down the coast and then flew home from Los Angeles. I had a lovely visit with everyone and found the train ride to be particularly relaxing and picturesque. It took eight hours to get from San Jose to Santa Barbara and I particularly enjoyed hanging out in the observation car, though I believe this picture was taken from the dining car at lunchtime. This is a horseshoe curve in the Santa Lucia Mountain Range in central California.

Dwarves on State Street

DSC_0247, a photo by Chez VH on Flickr.

I haven't posted any photos in awhile, so I thought I'd share just a few to "catch up". These are some of my Latin students at the state WJCL Latin Convention in Madison back in January. We had exactly eight students in our bunch, so for the "Fairy Tale Friday" spirit theme, they did Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (and won that particular competition as well as the small school spirit trophy). By the way, although we had fun with the dress up and silly stuff (and Horace does say: "Mix a little foolishness with your prudence: It's good to be silly at the right moment."), the kids also did very well academically and took home the 2nd place qualitative team trophy!!!

A Few Follow-up Tidbits to Yesterday's Post

In adoration this morning, I came across a few quotes about witnessing (which I may have posted on this blog eons ago) that I thought were worth looking at again in light of this "Living Differently" concept. I also just read Karen Edmisten's lovely post from yesterday:  Hmm, Shall I Blog About Contraception or Parchment Paper, which I really liked (!) and also relates to the nature of the important conversation going on right now.

Anyway, here are the quotes:

The first and fundamental mission that we receive from the sacred mysteries we celebrate is that of bearing witness by our lives. The wonder we experience at the gift God has made to us in Christ gives new impulse to our lives and commits us to becoming witnesses of his love. We become witnesses when, through our actions, words and way of being, Another makes himself present.
- Pope Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis

Something I constantly notice is that unembarrassed joy has become rarer. Joy today is increasingly saddled with moral and ideological burdens, so to speak. When someone rejoices, he is afraid of offending against solidarity with the many people who suffer. I don't have any right to rejoice, people think, in a world where there is so much misery, so much injustice.

I can understand that. There is a moral attitude at work here. But this attitude is nonetheless wrong. The loss of joy does not make the world better - and, conversely, refusing joy for the sake of suffering does not help those who suffer. The contrary is true. The world needs people who discover the good, who rejoice in it and thereby derive the impetus and courage to do good. Joy, then, does not break with solidarity. When it is the right kind of joy, when it is not egotistic, when it comes from the perception of the good, then it wants to communicate itself, and it gets passed on. In this connection, it always strikes me that in the poor neighborhoods of, say, South America, one sees many more laughing happy people than among us. Obviously, despite all their misery, they still have the perception of the good to which they cling and in which they can find encouragement and strength.

In this sense we have a new need for that primordial trust which ultimately only faith can give. That the world is basically good, that God is there and is good. That it is good to live and to be a human being. This results, then, in the courage to rejoice, which in turn becomes commitment to making sure that other people, too, can rejoice and receive good news.

- Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth

Living Differently

It's always given me a strange feeling to realize that people give thought to details of my own (and my family's) personal life. I'm really quite introverted by nature, so I tend to be somewhat reluctant to share such intimate details and at times have been a little unnerved by comments others make. This was particularly evident when I was expecting our second and it became obvious to people (who certainly weren't afraid to ask) that we had exactly one girl and one boy (on the way). It seems like every time I walked into a grocery store, I got the same questions. Oh, do you know what you're having? Oh, a boy, and you already have a little girl! How perfect!  Then you're done of course? *

Years later (but quite a few years ago now, and not at my current residence), I was expecting number four and never really knew how to let the neighbors know I was expecting. One took care of the problem proactively for me and asked if I was pregnant. When I answered in the affirmative, her response was:  "Wow, you really are Catholic." I walked away completely speechless. How do you answer something like that?

What I would have liked to explain to her was that I don't at all feel forced by my church to have a bunch of kids. Rather, I have a bunch of kids because my church has helped me to understand the joy and beauty and love and overabundance of goodness of bringing life into the world and trusting that, though this is not an easy process and there is much suffering involved in the process of bringing children into the world (not only at the point of birth of course!) that the joy and love and life more than compensate for that.

And really, the church taught this to me primarily through many amazing families who witnessed it to me - including my own family, my older siblings' families and many others.

And so the question I'm thinking about is how do we help others embrace this vision we have? Well, first of all, talking about it is a good thing!!! (Do check out this cool article... HHS Religious Freedom Battle Yields Unexpected Rewards)

What I've seen in my experiences and vicariously through people I know is that it's really through getting to know people who live this way that most people come around to accepting this different way of living. In order to embrace the concept, I think people need to encounter families that have embraced life and all of its complications; seeing that the thing is not only possible, but beautiful. I think our task is to go out and be those families for others. To put our light on a lampstand where others can see it. Not to set up an artificially perfect image for others, but to allow ourselves to be present to others as we are. And this does include fully embracing the idea of being life-loving Catholics. That should show through in how we treat every person that we encounter.

And that brings me to an important point. One rather enormous mistake that some life-loving Catholics make is to be as nosy and presumptive as those people in grocery stores I mentioned above. Making assumptions about whether or not someone is using artificial birth control or jumping to conclusions about them based on family size are wrong and potentially very harmful. Even as a mother of six I've had some presumptive comments from well-meaning Catholics about not having a new baby in eight years. These were only annoying and sad to me, but these kinds of things can be terribly, terribly harmful. There are a million reasons why people have the number of children they do or the spaces between children that they do (some of which can be very painful, many of which are out of the parents' control and all of which are, at least to a large extent, personal) and we should never, ever make assumptions about them. JUST DON'T DO IT!

*These kinds of grocery-store conversations don't always end up this way, of course. I've had a number of very interesting conversations that started with the usual sorts of family-size questions but ended up with an implied admission that these people are yearning to talk with someone else about their desire to have children or their frustration with their husband not letting them have more children or their initial desire to have a bunch of kids but present need of reassurance. So I do have a certain appreciation for these kinds of conversations!!!

This'n'That

I've been hit and miss with blogging for awhile, but always want to get back to it. I've realized over time that writing really helps me clarify my thoughts and thus gain more confidence in what I'm doing and how I want to go about doing it.

While reading Elizabeth Foss's lovely blog post this morning, it occurred to me that I could take the concept of these formula-based blog post things and make them more my own. I also don't expect to keep the sub-titles consistent.

So here is a little of what I'm up to at the moment (without falling into the mistake of trying to catch up on everything since I last wrote):

I'm basking in...


The gorgeous spring beauty right in our own backyard. All of our blossoming trees (pear, apple, dogwood?, etc) are in full spring splendor right now. It's a little strange because they are blooming so early - I think it's 3-4 weeks early than usual. Sadly they will all be past-peak when Ria comes home from college next month.

I'm feeling grateful for...

The beauty of yesterday's little Divine Mercy Service at our parish. Though our church is very simple in appearance, we have a huge, beautiful crucifix that dominates the sanctuary. So yesterday, with the abundance of Easter flowers in front of the altar, the Divine Mercy picture on a stand in front, the monstrance on top of the altar and that lovely crucifix, I couldn't imagine any more beauty for this setting. I have a confession to make. I usually find the sung version of the Divine Mercy Chaplet a bit tedious, but yesterday, with all of that beauty, I was perfectly content to be there for the entire thing.

Who knew?

That my children would enjoy tree trimming! No, we didn't do anything up high, but they almost single-handedly (especially the 8 and 12 year olds) cleared out all of the dead branches near the base of our two big pine trees - and completely relished the task. They were rewarded with a trip to Culvers (yum!) and the great thing is that, unlike weeds, these will not grow back any time soon. ;)


We've been watching...

On Saturday, John and I watched The Devil Wears Prada with Gus and Terri (ages 16 and 14). Such a good movie and they really *got* it.

Yesterday we watched the old Titanic movie A Night to Remember (you can watch it on YouTube for free in 13 parts - Gus knows how to set up a playlist so that each piece is automatically loaded). For some reason I thought we had already passed the 100th anniversary (my mind had April 12th as the day, presumably getting mixed up because the year ended in "12") - so we were amazed to discover that we were actually watching it on the hundredth anniversary. There was something particularly solemn about doing so - partly, I suppose, because *remembering* is such an important thing for us as people. I was concerned that it would be too disturbing for the youngest set (who are 8 and 10 now by the way), and there was quite a bit of screaming (!), but they were fine with it (snuggled up on either side of me), especially since I let them watch something laugh-out-loud afterwards so they wouldn't go to sleep with the tragedy so present on their minds. The kids very ably recognized things that were done wrong and should be changed (like leaving the radio on in other ships 24/7). I was able to give them a little background on the hearings that went on in the aftermath of the sinking. It was particularly interesting to discuss with them the importance of staying calm in a difficult situation and even tangential things like how the brave musicians helped out because music has such a powerful effect on us.

I'm reading...

I'm finally reading Suzie Andres' collection of essays on Catholic unschooling (A Little Way of Homeschooling). It's been sitting on my shelf for a year, but I've learned (even though I'm not always good at the follow-through) that I need to be patient with myself in what I read. Now seems like just the right time for this book. It's funny too because I had real "unschooling moment" with my littlest ones yesterday. Kate and Frank (ages 10 and 8) were talking about sonic booms. As far as I could tell, no one in the family had deliberately talked to them about sonic booms or even necessarily had a conversation with them about the topic. They've just picked it up here and there as side points in books and movies.

We've also recently returned to the wonderful world of periodicals. For a long time we didn't get a newspaper or many magazines because we just weren't using them very well. A few months ago I decided it was time for a change. I had been neglecting the political arena with my kids (having gotten rather burnt out on politics myself) and decided it was time for another subscription to The Wall Street Journal (I am particularly fond of Peggy Noonan and James Taranto). I really find the WSJ to be the best source of non-sensationalized news. And with the student subscription price, you get a 75% discount (I was able to sign Gus up as a homeschooled teen). I also ordered subscriptions for National Geographic, Scientific American, Scientific American Mind and Catholic Digest. Interesting stuff, even if some of them do require a skeptical eye at times (what doesn't?). We found this special issue of National Geographic to be particularly interesting and helpful: National Geographic 100 Scientific Discoveries that Changed the World.

Besides ordering these things, I set up an area in our living room especially for casual reading of this sort.

I've been thinking about...





Pope Benedict on his birthday today.

The nature of stories, why we read books, how they affect us and even how our attitude towards a book affects what we get out of it. I do think that books can be thought of, in a way, as living things. For one thing, every time a book is read, it is a unique experience. For example, I recently read a non-religious book on the nature of conflict and relationships between people. I found it dovetailed nicely with a lot of my religious beliefs and it impacted me in a particular way because of this. I can even read the same book multiple times and have completely different experiences. I even like to think in terms of approaching a book in a charitable way. If I let myself be open to taking away from a book what is useful to me and not get too caught up in things I don't agree with (or that perhaps just rub me the wrong way), I find the process to be much more constructive. If, on the other hand, I start out with a bad attitude toward a book, it can very much twist the experience.



I'm asking for prayers for...

My nephew Nick who suffers from spina bifida and has been very sick (in and out of the hospital) lately.