Most Sunday evening at our church, you can find worshipers wearing clothing that runs the gamut from business-casual all the way to gardening or bicycle-wear. We've got a tradition of coming-as-we-are to worship, secure in the belief that God loves us as we are and we don't need to prove our devotion with fancy garb.
However, the other Sunday a group of young men from the Mennonite Voluntary Service household showed up wearing neckties, something we'd never seen them do before! One of the volunteers is getting married soon, and they invited us to help him get used to the idea of dressing up for the wedding by wearing ties on Sunday evening in solidarity. So ties have been appearing around the necks of unexpected people at church recently.
Last Sunday I saw a delightful interaction. Joy's former daycare buddy has a younger sister, an adorable curly-haired toddler, not yet two. Little Sister was sitting on her daddy's lap during the service, giggling over his necktie, which he never wears ordinarily. She was trying to stick the end of the tie into his mouth, and he was playing along, lipping at it and then pretending to spit it out. Just the sort of playful little back-and-forth interaction that automatically happens when you enter the average little tyke's world during the peek-a-boo years.
Not every family gets to have that experience with their toddler, though.
Joy certainly wasn't interested in that kind of back-and-forth interactive people play at that age.
So I'm feeling extra-blessed and grateful that we're getting it now.
There's been just an explosion of back-and-forth giggly-games in the past few weeks, building on the "funniest things in the world" snippets that I've posted about occasionally this past year. The game might involve yawning back and forth. It might involve her greeting one of her therapists with an expectant "woof! woof!" at the door (shades of John Elder Robison!) There have been "in, out" games involving toys and a bucket. There have been "on, off" games around stacker-toys (and, less ideally, light switches!) Lots of peek-a-boo, with variations: "bye-bye / HELLO!" "Where's the turkey? / GOBBLE-GOBBLE-GOBBLE!"
My favorite recent game, though, goes like this:
Joy comes over and leans on me for a cuddle and says "NNNNIGH-nigh!"
Then I hug her, stroke her hair, pat her shoulder.
Then she pops up with a mischievous twinkle and announces "GUCK-guh!" (wake up!) And then we giggle and do it all over again -- JoyDad and Joy are upstairs playing the nigh-night game as we speak.
Y'know, I could tie myself into all sorts of regretful knots, in the comparison that Joy is only NOW doing -- at the age of almost seven -- what comes naturally to a kiddo five years younger.
I choose instead to rejoice in our blessings, and to enjoy this delightful interactive peek-a-boo stage to its fullest.
Maybe I'll celebrate by wearing a tie to church tonight...
Showing posts with label Mennonites. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mennonites. Show all posts
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Hoop Dreams
OK, I got some of the leftovers off my plate. Drew up a press kit page for the handbells web site, revised a document regarding Joy's strengths and our ongoing concerns for her upcoming IEP, and (this is a big one) got the files sent to the printer for the book of my late mother's autobiographical writings that I've been working on editing.
Now I can write about the weekend.
Our big event this weekend was our church's annual winter retreat. Every February we gather at a retreat center by a state park about an hour's drive from here for a weekend of fellowship and a Sunday morning worship service. There are games, there are crafts, there are communally-prepared meals, there's a talent show, there's sledding and skiing and hiking. It's a wonderful time.
February 2008 (i.e. last year's) retreat was a disaster as far as Joy was concerned. She was still slumping from a big regression that had started that Christmas, which stole her language and affected her behavior. She was having several knock-down seizures a day, each of which took an hour of intense comforting to recover from. In retrospect, we think there may have been a virus involved too somewhere along the line. At any rate, we took her to retreat anyway, and she just got more and more miserable as we went. In between seizures she went tearing around the center fussing and leaving a trail of destruction. We were hoping that naptime would be at least a break, but instead of napping or playing quietly, she stood up in her tented pack-n-play and screamed bloodly murder. For ages, with no sign of stopping. Finally JoyDad took her home. I stayed at the retreat with Rose, exhausted and wrung out like a limp washrag. It was a hard time.
This year was a huge contrast.
Touch wood, y'all, but Joy hasn't had a knock-down seizure since mid-September. That was the first major thing. Second, she did not have the Christmas regression. Third, her boundaries have improved and she's more willing to hang out quietly on my lap while something else is going on. Fourth, her mood is happier on the whole.
With this background, I was willing to even take the girls to retreat solo on Saturday morning. (JoyDad came up later that afternoon; he had a memorial service to attend at noon.) Joy was contented throughout the slightly nerve-wracking trip as the snow was falling pretty hard. When we arrived, we had a friend all lined up to watch Joy while I unpacked the car. Joy hung nicely with me through the next event, which was a group game involving speed-singing of hymns and competitive reading of Bible verses all full of unpronounceable names. Much hilarity!
Since Joy has been skipping naps most days anyway, we didn't even try to put her into her travel tent. Instead, another friend volunteered to watch her for a while so I could go participate in a book discussion. Funny enough, the book discussion actually was sparked by this humble blog, from when I posted back in November about Tracy Kidder's book Mountains Beyond Mountains. A friend from church who keeps up with Elvis Sightings was intrigued by my recommendation and organized a group of people to read the book and discuss it at retreat! It was a fine conversation, with thoughtful articulate people, several of whom had been to Haiti themselves and/or work in medical professions (the book deals with a charismatic physician whose primary work is among the poor in Haiti). All in the context of beautiful snow falling gently outside the huge windows.
When I got back to Joy, her baby-sitter -- who has a grown son with a spectrum diagnosis in context of a different genetic condition than Joy's -- said they'd enjoyed their time together. "She's very smart, you know," she told me. Bless her for seeing it!
Our smart little girl kept it all together despite the lack of nap. She even surprised us at dinner time by eating her entire helping of macaroni with her spoon, with no prompting from us! She usually digs in with her fingers.
But when are we going to get to the hula hoops, you ask? Well, I'm glad you brought that up.
I mentioned earlier that the retreat features a talent show. This year, Rose decided that she wanted to do a hula hoop act. So she and JoyDad concocted a number wherein JoyDad played Wipe Out on his electric guitar. She has never taken a dance class, and I (not a dancer by any means) have been her only hula hoop teacher. However, she has such a sense of rhythm and has done a bit of group dance routine stuff in gym. And with those natural tools, she put together a wonderful piece where she shimmied and strutted back and forth with that hula hoop a-swirling, dropped to her knees and came back up repeatedly, and then let the hoop drop to her ankle and hopscotched it around with the other foot. All in perfect time to the screaming guitar.
The crowd went wild.
Video of this amazing act does exist, but we've got some technical hurdles before we get it onto YouTube. If you'd like me to e-mail you the link when we get it ready, say so in the comments or send me a message.
But that wasn't all. See, Rose decided to share her hula-hooping delight in another way. She brought all seven of her hoops along, and made them available in the main gathering room for the use of all the retreat participants. (I did promise that I'd replace any breakage.) It was amazing how the hoops resonated with all ages and shapes of people. From the short to the tall, from the curvy to the beanpole, from the toddlers to the highschoolers -- male and female both! -- to the highschoolers' parents, a huge range of folks got into the act. The height of the hilarity happened after the post-talent-show ice cream feast, when JoyDad plugged his guitar back in and played music to hoop by: more Wipe Out, Johnny B. Goode, one song after another after another. He played till he started to wear out the fingernail on his pick hand!
Well, some of the attendees were joking that hula hooping might lead to... DANCING! (verboten among the more conservative Mennonites, but this crowd is pretty far out on the progressive end of the Menno spectrum, as it were.) And after JoyDad unplugged, sure enough, out came a couple of iPods to plug into the sound system. Line dancing! Cotton Eye Joe! Jump Around! My fellow Mennos and I boogied till I think I strained every muscle in my body that hadn't already been hula-hooped out of whack.
Then I played Boggle till midnight. Which made 20 hours straight of wakefulness, seeing as how Rose had awakened me at 4 am Saturday morning to present me with one of her two front teeth which she had finally wiggled out.
Then Joy woke up at 2:30 and started commenting loudly... I'm afraid I don't remember much of the next morning's worship service, though they tell me I was physically present. It was quite the night.
I actually did make it to the regular evening worship on Sunday too, after everyone had headed home and sorted themselves out. Rose surprised me during the sharing time part of our service ("joys & concerns"). She stood up on the chairs and declared loudly that she had a joy. She wanted everyone to know she was so happy that people had so much fun with her hula hoops at retreat.
There. As JoyDad commented on my last post, this is probably the only blog on the Interwebz that combines hula hoops, dancing Mennonites, and screaming guitars!
Now I can write about the weekend.
Our big event this weekend was our church's annual winter retreat. Every February we gather at a retreat center by a state park about an hour's drive from here for a weekend of fellowship and a Sunday morning worship service. There are games, there are crafts, there are communally-prepared meals, there's a talent show, there's sledding and skiing and hiking. It's a wonderful time.
February 2008 (i.e. last year's) retreat was a disaster as far as Joy was concerned. She was still slumping from a big regression that had started that Christmas, which stole her language and affected her behavior. She was having several knock-down seizures a day, each of which took an hour of intense comforting to recover from. In retrospect, we think there may have been a virus involved too somewhere along the line. At any rate, we took her to retreat anyway, and she just got more and more miserable as we went. In between seizures she went tearing around the center fussing and leaving a trail of destruction. We were hoping that naptime would be at least a break, but instead of napping or playing quietly, she stood up in her tented pack-n-play and screamed bloodly murder. For ages, with no sign of stopping. Finally JoyDad took her home. I stayed at the retreat with Rose, exhausted and wrung out like a limp washrag. It was a hard time.
This year was a huge contrast.
Touch wood, y'all, but Joy hasn't had a knock-down seizure since mid-September. That was the first major thing. Second, she did not have the Christmas regression. Third, her boundaries have improved and she's more willing to hang out quietly on my lap while something else is going on. Fourth, her mood is happier on the whole.
With this background, I was willing to even take the girls to retreat solo on Saturday morning. (JoyDad came up later that afternoon; he had a memorial service to attend at noon.) Joy was contented throughout the slightly nerve-wracking trip as the snow was falling pretty hard. When we arrived, we had a friend all lined up to watch Joy while I unpacked the car. Joy hung nicely with me through the next event, which was a group game involving speed-singing of hymns and competitive reading of Bible verses all full of unpronounceable names. Much hilarity!
Since Joy has been skipping naps most days anyway, we didn't even try to put her into her travel tent. Instead, another friend volunteered to watch her for a while so I could go participate in a book discussion. Funny enough, the book discussion actually was sparked by this humble blog, from when I posted back in November about Tracy Kidder's book Mountains Beyond Mountains. A friend from church who keeps up with Elvis Sightings was intrigued by my recommendation and organized a group of people to read the book and discuss it at retreat! It was a fine conversation, with thoughtful articulate people, several of whom had been to Haiti themselves and/or work in medical professions (the book deals with a charismatic physician whose primary work is among the poor in Haiti). All in the context of beautiful snow falling gently outside the huge windows.
When I got back to Joy, her baby-sitter -- who has a grown son with a spectrum diagnosis in context of a different genetic condition than Joy's -- said they'd enjoyed their time together. "She's very smart, you know," she told me. Bless her for seeing it!
Our smart little girl kept it all together despite the lack of nap. She even surprised us at dinner time by eating her entire helping of macaroni with her spoon, with no prompting from us! She usually digs in with her fingers.
But when are we going to get to the hula hoops, you ask? Well, I'm glad you brought that up.
I mentioned earlier that the retreat features a talent show. This year, Rose decided that she wanted to do a hula hoop act. So she and JoyDad concocted a number wherein JoyDad played Wipe Out on his electric guitar. She has never taken a dance class, and I (not a dancer by any means) have been her only hula hoop teacher. However, she has such a sense of rhythm and has done a bit of group dance routine stuff in gym. And with those natural tools, she put together a wonderful piece where she shimmied and strutted back and forth with that hula hoop a-swirling, dropped to her knees and came back up repeatedly, and then let the hoop drop to her ankle and hopscotched it around with the other foot. All in perfect time to the screaming guitar.
The crowd went wild.
Video of this amazing act does exist, but we've got some technical hurdles before we get it onto YouTube. If you'd like me to e-mail you the link when we get it ready, say so in the comments or send me a message.
But that wasn't all. See, Rose decided to share her hula-hooping delight in another way. She brought all seven of her hoops along, and made them available in the main gathering room for the use of all the retreat participants. (I did promise that I'd replace any breakage.) It was amazing how the hoops resonated with all ages and shapes of people. From the short to the tall, from the curvy to the beanpole, from the toddlers to the highschoolers -- male and female both! -- to the highschoolers' parents, a huge range of folks got into the act. The height of the hilarity happened after the post-talent-show ice cream feast, when JoyDad plugged his guitar back in and played music to hoop by: more Wipe Out, Johnny B. Goode, one song after another after another. He played till he started to wear out the fingernail on his pick hand!
Well, some of the attendees were joking that hula hooping might lead to... DANCING! (verboten among the more conservative Mennonites, but this crowd is pretty far out on the progressive end of the Menno spectrum, as it were.) And after JoyDad unplugged, sure enough, out came a couple of iPods to plug into the sound system. Line dancing! Cotton Eye Joe! Jump Around! My fellow Mennos and I boogied till I think I strained every muscle in my body that hadn't already been hula-hooped out of whack.
Then I played Boggle till midnight. Which made 20 hours straight of wakefulness, seeing as how Rose had awakened me at 4 am Saturday morning to present me with one of her two front teeth which she had finally wiggled out.
Then Joy woke up at 2:30 and started commenting loudly... I'm afraid I don't remember much of the next morning's worship service, though they tell me I was physically present. It was quite the night.
I actually did make it to the regular evening worship on Sunday too, after everyone had headed home and sorted themselves out. Rose surprised me during the sharing time part of our service ("joys & concerns"). She stood up on the chairs and declared loudly that she had a joy. She wanted everyone to know she was so happy that people had so much fun with her hula hoops at retreat.
There. As JoyDad commented on my last post, this is probably the only blog on the Interwebz that combines hula hoops, dancing Mennonites, and screaming guitars!
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