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Listen to this.
Here’s what I found on the dining room table this morning. They would have submitted it to the school’s director today, too, except that someone spilled coffee(?) on it.
Text:
NAP PETITION
We, the 3/4 and 5/6 [grade classrooms], believe that it is unjust that the K and K alone are allowed naps, while we carry heavier burdens, both figuratively and literally. Are we unworthy of naps? Have we committed some wrong that degrades us? If so, please speak up! If not just remember that Tyranny is no substitute for nap-time. Thank you.
Today only! The Sinner’s Guide to Natural Family Planning – Kindle edition only — usually $4.99, today only $2.99 (which is the cheapest Amazon will let me set the price at).
[This post originally ran, in a slightly different form, in the National Catholic Registerin February of 2013.]
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PIC ashes on forehead
I feel like I can’t walk ten feet without bumping into an enthusiastic new convert, which is delightful, and so encouraging! Welcome, everybody! We papists have a little saying: Venite intus; horribilis est!
Heh. Anyway, you may be looking forward to your first Lent with enthusiasm but some trepidation. If so, you’re ahead of the game: it should be something to get excited about. Lent can be a wonderful source of grace. But as such, it can be a real mine field of screw-ups, especially for rookies. Here are some typical rookie mistakes during Lent:
Giving Up All The Things!!! Don’t forget: even though it’s Lent, you still have to live the rest of your life. So it’s probably not wise to take on such a complicated set of obligations and observances that you will need to hire a monk to follow you around, reminding you that you have exactly four minutes to make supper or earn a living before you’re due for your next spiritual reading, or to pray anther five decades of the rosary, volunteer another half hour at the soup kitchen, say a blessing before, during, and after sneezing, and put a fresh set of dried peas in your shoes, all on four hours of sleep without a pillow and after a breakfast consisting of half a prune. Just pick one or two things that you can reasonably stick with, or you will burn out and/or drop dead.
Giving up the thing that makes you bearable Lent is about you doing sacrifices, not making everybody else suffer while they endure your enduring your sacrifice. If your family sits you down 48 hours into Lent and presents you with a court order demanding that you start smoking or drinking coffee again, then have mercy and listen to them.
Leaving Loopholes As I’m prone to explain shoutily to my lazy, rotten kids, “That’s not cleaning, that’s just moving the mess around!” You’re not allowed to tidy up your bed by shoving all your junk under the bed. In the same way, it doesn’t really benefit you much to give up Facebook if you’re suddenly going to become a champion-level Twitterer. Or if you gave up chocolate, you get no points for diving head first into a vat of caramel. Substituting toothpicks for cigarettes, or water for beer, is a real penance; substituting YouTube for Netflix, not so much.
Waiting until the last minute for confession You may think you’re getting the most out of your Lenten Experience by doing one final purge during Holy Week. This is a horrible mistake. Unless you want to be on line forever and ever, or unless your priest shows signs that he would like some extra penance by being in that box morning, noon, and night, do try to get to confession before the last minute! Ideally, you should get to confession more than once during Lent, anyway. And of course, if you haven’t gotten around to it, later is better than never. But be aware that many priests do not hear confessions on Good Friday or Holy Saturday. There’s some dispute over whether or not they’re permitted to hear confessions on those days; but for many overworked priests, there’s simply no time, with all the preparations they must make for the Triduum.
Getting cute about it The standard observations are standard for a reason. I know it’s fun to be creative, but it’s kind of obnoxious to give up — I don’t know, adjectives, or clothes that match, or foods with the letter “r” in them. It might actually work out to be a difficult penance, but come on. No need to reinvent the wheel. If you’re a naturally creative person, consider it your penance to bow to the ordinary, and do what everyone else is doing for once.
Getting overly somber about it Yes, it’s a penitential season, when we focus, like no other time of year, on the ugliness of sin, and on the suffering and sorrows Our Lord took on for our sake. It makes perfect sense to curtail parties and frivolities until after Lent (it’s only 40 days!), and to make our daily lives take on a penitential tone which is unmistakably different from the rest of the year. But that doesn’t mean you need to quit smiling, or that we can’t enjoy being with friends and family, or listening to the first robin sing. We’re not Calvinists or Jansenists or any other “ist” that makes us quit being human.
Not getting back on that horse If you fail, that doesn’t mean you’ve picked the wrong penance, or that you’re incapable of doing penance. It means you’re a human being. Duh. That’s why we need Lent. Yes, you can back away from penances that turn out to be really disastrous; but don’t quit just because you fail. God likes it when we try to become holier, but He loves it when we mess up, repent, and try again. As Jen Fulwiler has pointed out, Lent really starts about halfway through, when the novelty has worn off and you still have to keep on sticking with your dumb old, boring old, purifying old penance.
After reading this list of don’t and more don’ts, do you feel a little taken aback — a little less confident about your powers to turn yourself into a better person? Are you starting to think that there’s really no way you can make up for your sins on your own, and that you’re going to need ten boatloads of grace from the Holy Spirit to even get through the day, much less forty days straight?
Ah! Now we’re getting somewhere.
Is breast best? Maybe not — at least not in the long run.
A study published in the journal Social Science and Medicine followed children, some breast fed, some bottle fed — and found that there is not much difference in how the kids turned out after babyhood. According to Slate, breastfed and bottle fed kids were measured for “11 outcomes, including BMI, obesity, asthma, different measures of intelligence, hyperactivity, and parental attachment.
And there just wasn’t much difference.
Huh? That’s not what we’re used to hearing. We’ve been told that a child who was breastfed as a baby is practically guaranteed to edge out his bottle fed peers in almost every area. So why does this study tell a different story?
Here’s why this study is different: it didn’t compare breastfed children with bottle fed children; it compared breastfed children with their bottle fed siblings. The way they were raised — the education level of their parents, their economic status — was the same in every way. The only difference was how they were fed.
In previous studies, bottle fed children scored lower than breastfed children because bottle fed children tend to be less advantaged in many other ways, which accounts for things like poorer health, lower scores in school, behavior problems, etc. Slate explains:
When children from different families were compared, the kids who were breast-fed did better on those 11 measures than kids who were not breast-fed. But, as Colen points out, mothers who breast-feed their kids are disproportionately advantaged—they tend to be wealthier and better educated. When children fed differently within the same family were compared—those discordant sibling pairs—there was no statistically significant difference in any of the measures, except for asthma. Children who were breast-fed were at a higher risk for asthma than children who drank formula.
Why is this important? Because, in some circles, there is enormous pressure put upon women in difficult situations to breastfeed no matter what the physical or emotional cost to baby, mother, or family. I’ve written about breastfeeding bullies before, andI’m reprinting that post here.
Breastfeeding is lovely, breastfeeding is a gift, breastfeeding is practically a miracle. I have breastfed for something like 150 months of my life, and my 26-month-old toddler isn’t weaned yet. I know why women breastfeed, and I believe that, in general, it’s good for women and for families, as well as for babies. I know why it’s important. But I also know a good many mothers, excellent, dedicated, generous, tenderhearted mothers, who feed their babies with bottles.
It’s wrong to tell women that the only way to be a good mother is to breastfeed. It isn’t right. It isn’t compassionate. And now, we discover, it probably isn’t even medically sound.
