playing nicely

Dear E,
Thank you for playing with your little brother so nicely yesterday. He adores you and loves to feel included in your world. You have no idea how happy it makes my heart.

Love,

Mama 

What she said

I realized that I don’t need to blog. I just need to read everyone else’s clever blogs and then compile the highlights in one place. I keep reading things that that make me want to stand up and shout. 

OMG, this writer must be my blog-twin, my internet-doppelganger. I pretty much loved and/or agreed with everything she said. And she said it with grace and honesty. Read it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joy-gabriel/kate-middleton-and-the-mom-in-the-mirror_b_3672553.html

“Once you cross the threshold into motherhood, there is no going back. You might feel instantly and with acuity "Help! What did I DO? I'm not ready for this! Get me offa this thing! I don't know what I'm doing!" but it's too late. The curtain is up on the most important role you will ever play and it's OK that you and your body have shifted so that it fits. More: it is right and good. You're not supposed to zip up your old jeans and slip back into your old life.”

And I am also totally developing a blog-crush (hmm, would that be a ‘blush’ or a ‘crog’?) on Jen Hatmaker who writes with wit, truth, and panache. She could be a stand-up comedienne; her material is that good. She has nailed the conversational insanity that takes place between parents and young offspring. I’ve been wanting to study the patterns. I’ve already written about how my kids seem to stockpile demands until the second I enter the room and then they come flying out – like bats out of hell. [Read that post here.] The following dialog seems to preside in our house right now:

Child: a request or a whine

Me: a sensible answer (“not right now”/“let me think about it”/etc.)

Child: “Whhyyy?”

The Whyyys are dangerous things. They make a person crazy. How the heck does one explain Whyyy we don’t eat gummy worms before 8:00 a.m.? Whyyys are the reason parents say dumb stuff like, “Because I said so!”.

Jen writes about this, too, and much more in this riotous gem about the End of Summer Parent: http://jenhatmaker.com/blog/2013/08/16/worst-end-of-summer-mom-ever-a-sequel

She reflects on how she will spend her first hours of freedom after her kids return to school:
“What will I do? I will think my thoughts, which I haven’t heard since June 5th. I miss my thoughts and I look forward to seeing what they’ve been doing. For all I know they could’ve been curing cancer, but they’ve been stamped out by missives like He won’t quit touching my game/remote control/Afro and Could you make me a sandwich/pizza/taco and I am bored/hot/hungry and When are we going to leave/eat/bathe again? My thoughts have done all they can do for these people, and they’ve put in their notice.”
 
And then there is Glennon, dear Glennon (of Momastery fame), who is currently on a well-deserved sabbatical. Somehow the topics she writes about dovetail with sermons at church and with what is going on in my life, so she often seems magic to me. She touched me with her thoughts on loneliness and the internet. It struck a chord with our senior pastor, too, because he quoted her in a sermon.
  
Tom (our pastor) was talking about technology and how it has the power to connect us and the power to isolate us. He cited Glennon’s confession that while she has more than 80,000 readers, she hadn’t had a real, live conversation with a friend in weeks. This notion was already bouncing around in my head because I was working on a devotion and thinking about why Stephen ministry (more on that later) is so valuable: Stephen ministers give the gift of real, live conversations to those who are hurting in an age where face-to-face conversations are becoming rare.

Glennon writes:

“The internet, I think – is turning into a compulsion for me. I’m starting to look to it for my own worth. I’m looking to it for comfort and as a balm for loneliness. I’m using it to hide a little from real live people. And I’m using it to numb my feelings. To zone out. ... The internet is not bad any more than wine or food are bad. But we can use all three in ways that dull our spirits … Every once in a while, I need to silence all the thousands of voices coming at me through the internet so that I can hear God in me. That is the only voice, the ONLY voice, that I can trust will never lead me wrong.”

So, stay tuned. Listen to the voices in your life. Schedule time for face-to-face conversations with those you love and enjoy. I will too. And I’ll continue to regurgitate what other better writers have said so we can all learn together.   

Christmas in July

When it was in the 100s last summer, we decided to make July 25th a Christmas-in-July celebration. For starters, we needed to remember that it would, in fact, get cooler. Listening to Christmas carols in July can seemingly drop the temperature by about 20 degrees.

We decorated the house, strung up white lights, and invited family over to eat some favorite holiday foods. In our clan, that includes monkey bread and an addictive cheeseball recipe that you eat with pretzel sticks. We also baked gingerbread cookies. We read Christmas stories and talked about baby Jesus, crafted winter-y scenes, and watched Frosty. We wore festive red and green. I even drug out the bin full of mittens and scarves and let the kids pretend it was cold outside. It was a huge hit. Here are some favorite photos from that day:

So you can bet that my oldest two children weren't about to let me forget July 25th this summer! We were sad that one set of cousins was not able to make it and that my folks were in Colorado enjoying real cooler temperatures. But we put on season-appropriate ensembles, hung the stockings, fired up Bing Crosby, enjoyed a holiday brunch, and opened small gifts. (Next year I will probably just wrap things they already own.) My crew even blessed me with an early wake-up call, just like the real December 25!  

The night before, Miss E and IMO took turns closing their eyes while the other one hid "gifts" in the stockings—a totally unscripted bonus! Miss E was so thrilled to see the looks on our faces the next morning when we found our treasures, such as a (used) binky for Baby S and a (half-full) bottle of hand sanitizer for me. Hmm, maybe the kids should be in charge of stocking-stuffing from now on? Who needs to spend money on tossed-away trinkets?

I share this not because I want you to vote me Pinterest's Mother of Year but because it was a day when I felt successful as a mom. Those days can be few and far between. I felt like I had given my kids something out-of-the-box that they might remember. I felt present. The practical, bah-humbug side of me wasn't enthused about dragging out the holiday décor knowing I'd be charged with putting it away in the days that followed. (I cannot even handle 15 minutes of Play-Dough, for crying out loud.) But I squashed that buzz-kill of a notion and got it all out anyway. And it paid dividends.

"... Let every heart prepare him room,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven, and heaven, and nature sing."