Just another manic Monday.

People, I am only one person. I can get one kid to one soccer practice at 5:15pm, and I can get the other to his soccer practice at 5:30, only a few miles away. But then both practices are over at 6:45, and I have to feed them, change one from his soccer practice clothes into a scout uniform, and then be in three places at 7pm.
P.S. - my husband is traveling. He's not here, not there, not anywhere.

Um, yeaahhhh. No. Not gonna happen.

I need help.

I'm lucky in that my mom is just down the street, so I can rope her into my chauffeuring rodeo. She'll pick up my youngest from soccer and take him home and feed him while my oldest son and I eat drive-thru and change clothes in the car and head to his scout meeting. But it means that my cub scout committee/den leader meeting doesn't happen. Is it that big of a deal? No. Is it hard to let go and admit I can't do it all?

Yes.

Dumb, I know. But I hate letting people down. Other people have changed their schedules in order to fit in that meeting, and yet it's the one I am choosing to jettison. Yes, I can get all the information I need on email later. No, I can't enjoy the other adults in person.

But it's hard to have to let go. It's hard to let people down. But as much as I enjoy those adults at the cub scout meeting, my kids come first. Where they have to be and when comes first. That's the order in which I chose what has to go. My things have to wait.

Of course, that's why I don't have time to work out anymore, which is making my clothes not fit as comfortably. And why blogging takes place at night, from bed, in the laptop a mere minutes before I pass out for another day. And why my google reader have over 1000 unread posts.

But that's my commitment to my kids right now. Someday they won't be here for me to drive around to practice, soon they'll be able to get themselves there and won't need me. At least not as a chauffeur. I can live with that.

struggling

I'm struggling! There I said it. It's true. I usually don't feel this way for more than a week but this time it's been for a couple months.  I'm struggling with being the mom I want to be. I'm struggling with being the owner of a growing business! I'm struggling with being the wife I want to be, with running my household the way I'd like, with the amount of sleep I want to get, the fact that one to four of my kids has been sick since Feb. 1 or with the fact that spring isn't coming soon enough. Mostly, I'm struggling with the fact that I'm struggling.

I can't seem to remember Thursday is media for my kids and I should send along their library books to return and pick out a new one. While they've never complained, I'm now writing it in my calendar.  I also can't seem to remember it's my week to blog here, sorry for the delay. 

I've been feeling this way for a while, but it seems to have come to fruitation and now I must resolve it.  I need to find the work life balance that I'm seeking.  My husband even does the majority of the cleaning, dishes, baths and some laundry. 

I'm torn between being a mom and building a business.  I started my business so I could spend more time with my kids!  Will there ever be true balance?

I admit I am struggling and it is so hard for me to say.  Does anyone else feel this way? 

Running Away.

When I was a kid, I remember my little brother stomping around the house in his cowboy boots and pajamas, angry about something. He announced he was going to run away. My mother, ever the calm presence, said, "Well. Okay. Let me help you pack."

I was a little taken aback by that, as was he. But she very calmly pulled out a little suitcase and laid it on his bed, and laid in a clean pair of pajamas and Underoos (I think he was in a pajamas only stage, I guess? It was a long time ago.) She asked if he would like to take a snack, he might get hungry while walking. He nodded, still angry but a little confused, and so she dropped some cookies into a zip bag and laid them into the suitcase. She zipped it up, walked him to the front door and handed him his suitcase to carry (not a rollaway, we didn't have those in the seventies, you know,) kissed him on the head and said she would miss him indeed. He walked out the front door and down the sidewalk, his two little arms lifting his suitcase up, getting tired almost as soon as he was out the door.

At this point, I was a little beside myself, that my mother would let her six year old son walk out the front door to run away, much less help him pack. She didn't even try to convince him to stay! But then I heard her go to phone and call the neighbor down the street and tell her what was going on. And then I understood.

Sure enough, the neighbor leaned out her front door and invited him in to share some milk and cookies. He stayed for a couple of hours, watching cartoons on her TV while she piddled around the house, and then she announced that they would be having brussel sprouts for dinner. My brother didn't like brussel sprouts (and rightly so, they are food of the devil, as far as I'm concerned.) Ooh, that's too bad, the neighbor responded. I hear they're having spaghetti, down at your house.

And so he came trudging back up the walk shortly before my dad got home from work, and never a word was spoken in our house about the entire episode.

I often wonder how my mother knew how to deal with that situation, I guess I should ask her. Not only to allow him to follow through on his threat, but to never bring it up and try to drive home a lesson in it, allowing his little ego to stay intact (at least until he was an adult and we all teased him about it.) As a parent, I planned for how I would carry out the exact same technique with my own two stubborn boys, but oddly, the moment has never come.

Instead, sometimes I'm the one dreaming of running away. Sometimes my frustration with working and mothering and being a spouse and a housekeeper and a cook and a chauffeur get to me, and I can't seem to care about any of it anymore.

Sometimes when I get on the highway to go somewhere, I wonder what would happen if I just keep on driving instead of taking my exit. But I never seem to have enough gas in the tank to get very far, or any cookies should I get hungry.

And so I sigh a big sigh, and turn around and go home, knowing tomorrow will be a better day.

Or at least planning to stash some snacks in the car for next time.

Denial

My baby girl is going to start preschool in September. In some ways September seems eons away but as time has a habit of doing, it slides by faster than my brain can process the changes. Honestly, didn't I just find out I was pregnant with my third child?

D is my always baby. My last child. She's going to hate that label someday I suppose...until she has her always baby and then she'll understand.

One of my friends has 5 children and commented a few weeks ago about preschool for her fourth child who is 7 months older than D. I was taken completely off guard. There was no way these kids were old enough for preschool next year...but they are. Sigh.

Seeing your kids grow up is bittersweet. I miss the babies and toddlers they once were but love to see the kids they grow into. I suppose this is why I take so many photos. Thank goodness that the digital camera came along when I was pregnant with my first baby because I would definitely be broke by now if I had to buy film and pay processing fees to get all these photos of my kids!

Peace.

In my imagination, there is a lovely, wintery, holiday-themed photo right....



HERE.



In reality, the camera, where the aforementioned holiday photo is stored, is in our car, three floors down from our roadside hotel for the night. I am in my nightie, watching my teenager fall asleep and listening to the last wimpers of protest come from my toddler as she tries to settle into her portable crib in another new place. Our family has been on the road for three days now, logging 1100 miles so far on our trek from Michigan to my hometown in Florida. We have a little over 200 more miles to go today.

It's a photo of the lovely gingerbread men we made during the weekend, the ones we brought on the road with us and have been munching on along the way.

While trying to salvage the situation, I even tried to fudge it, searching for some appropriate photo in my library already. 8000 photos, not a one fits the bill. Fudge.

I suppose it is all a reminder to me that the events of our daily lives are rarely picture-picture, but they are always worth being present for.

Happy Holidays to All. May goodness and kindness be yours, and may you pass it on to every soul you meet during this season.

Boys and hygiene: like oil and water. Lots and lots of oil.

Remember when your little ones were so excited for that evening ritual of bathtime? When they couldn't wait to finish dinner so everyone could all run upstairs and strip off their clothes and climb in that big, bubbly hot, toy-filled tub of joy and splash around for a while, getting clean in the process?

Well, it ends. Especially with boys. They no longer long to be clean. They no longer care. They are too busy playing Nerf gun wars in the backyard or building intricate lego sets to be bothered with bathing, putting on clean socks, or for that matter, pajamas. Sometimes they sleep in their clothes. Nowadays all I hear when I suggest it's time for the bath or shower is whining. Now that my kids are a little more self-sufficient, (or at least I thought they were) I find myself saying things like, "when was the last time you used shampoo?" and "dude, you are ripe."

And what do I hear back from them? "Um, do I need to change my underwear?"

YES! This is a question that needs to be asked?

My friends with teens tell me it changes again soon, the pendulum swings back again, and then you cannot get them OUT of the shower.

I look forward to that. I think.

Change of Plans

This is the time of week that I was going to write about a fun craft/game idea I had and implemented with my older daughter's Brownie troop but instead of having time to write that I spent the week tending to my feverish son, keeping him home from school Monday-Thursday with little hope that he will be able to attend on Friday, which incidentally is the end of the quarter. My boy needs more help with his schoolwork than my daughter does, so when he misses school it is more detrimental than it might be otherwise.

But I can't change it. He needs to stay home if he is sick. I don't appreciate when other parents send their sick kids to school so that mine might catch their illness, so I won't do it to others. It is frustrating though. I don't like seeing my kids sick and his sickness is one of those borderline sicknesses where his fever is just hovering at the low-grade end and disappears while the ibuprofen is working, returning like clockwork every 5-6 hours. So he feels great and fine for 4-5 hours at a time then crashes hard again.

His little sister doesn't understand that her usually boisterous all the time big brother doesn't feel well and that's why he is home. She wrestles him and picks at him until he's shouting at her to stop. Then she cries, confused at why he doesn't want to play. Then, an hour later he wants to play because the medicine is working. When it's nap time I know that my son is not feeling well because he consents to, and actually takes a nap. His little sister is again confused. This is a novelty that her brother is home and napping with her. She fights sleep in favor of trying to illicit her brother's giggles at her antics. Nap time has taken longer this week.

Despite the disruption to the routine we have managed to get some good cuddle time, I made some homemade soup, my two little kids have played together more than they have before (which was still quite often). My older daughter has been jealous that her brother gets to stay home and she has to go to school but I remind her that the break is coming. I also told her she could stay home if she took a nap. That clinched her desire to go to school!

I'm taking the Boy to the doctor today to see if perhaps he has an ear infection or something of the sort that would garner him some antibiotics and a prompter recovery. I almost hope that is the case just so he doesn't keep relapsing.

Besides, I bribed my kids to be good in school this quarter with a trip to the indoor water park in Owatonna, MN, and I want him to be healthy so he can enjoy his reward next week!

Parenting: I think I'm doing it right, actually.

Sometimes I really wonder how damaged my kids will be when they grow up because I lost my cool at how long it takes them to make faces in the bathroom mirror before they actually brush their teeth. I joke with my friends about "well, that's why you save for therapy, Amiright? Ha ha, hee hee!"
But sometimes I worry. Like at 2am, when insomnia has made me her bitch once again, and I can't seem to shut off my brain. Well, and also because my husband made me watch Inglorious Basterds right before bed, and who wants to fall asleep after that? Not me.

Anyway. Parenting. I often worry I'm doing it totally wrong. And then every once in a while, I get a little brush with how I must be doing it pretty well, at least some of the time.
Like tonight, getting ready for bed. We spent a large portion of this holiday weekend cleaning up around the house, cutting back trees and bushes, overseeding the yard. I also spent some time indoors, doing laundry, excavating my way through to the playroom, sifting through size 6x T-shirts and shorts to be handed down or tossed, etc. The boys got into the swing of it, too, and took down old stuff from their bulletin boards in their bedrooms to make way for the piles of new stuff. Stuff I had brought from the towering stack of papers that had been living in my kitchen since school was out last May. My oldest, now ten, took down a Sports Illustrated for Kids centerfold of Alex Rodriguez and gently set it aside. He shares a birthday with ARod, but that's about the only thing they have in common. The kid doesn't even play baseball.

"Buddy," I said, "if you don't want that anymore just throw it away."
"Someone might want it. Lots of kids like Alex Rodriguez."
"I know, bud, but it's from last year, he doesn't even have those stats anymore, it's obsolete."
"Mom! I bet there are lots of poor kids who don't have any posters who look up to him and would love a poster like this. I can't just throw it away!"

Just when I think nobody is looking, they are getting it. When I stop and pick up someone else's empty cup on the ground and put it in the trash, even though they don't look up from their DS game, they make some kind of mental note in the back of their brains, back behind How To Reload A Nerf Gun Magazine On The Fly. When I take them to Harvesters to sort apples, or I mention that I am serving lunch at a food kitchen, they are absorbing. When I walk out my front door with an extra leash and try and capture the neighbor's dog who has broken through a weak spot in the fence, they see me. When I tell them, many months ago, that we are going to donate an entire bin of toys to kids who don't have any, start sorting what you want to keep and what you are willing to part with, they understand. And they kind of enjoy it.

When my kids are adults, they may have some memories of me screaming at them, exasperated, to please put on their shoes and get in the car so we can make it to soccer practice, maybe only a few minutes late. Do you have your shinguards? A ball? A water bottle? No I don't know where your cleates are, they aren't mine, you are old enoughtokeeptrackofyourownshoes maybeifyouputthemawaywheretheyaresupposedtogoyouwouldn'thavethisproblem ohmyGodgetinthedamncar.

But I'm hoping that if they think of these things, they will think of them in between the doing, the acting, the loving and supporting and volunteering and being responsible that I've tried to display myself. I'm hoping my actions will linger longer, and louder, than my words.

Welcome to my world.

turns out, if you normally set your phone in the cupholder of your minivan while you drive, and then you uncharacteristically bring along an open cup of water into the car with you to run errands, the odds of you dropping your phone into that cup of water after sending a quick text (at a red light!) are probably not worth betting against.

This is what happens when your kid gets a hold of your camera.

She's such a hack.

I had always thought calling someone a hack was a bad thing, until I became a parent in the age of the Internet. But as it turns out, a "hack" has come to mean a way to get what you need, working with what you have. I love that.
You know, my mom and I talk about this parenting thing sometimes. She's a little in awe of the network I have to work out some of the problems we come up against, or to celebrate and share the wins. She didn't have Dr. Google to turn to when someone ran a fever with a weird rash in the middle of the night. She didn't have girlfriends in other cities to which she could reach out and vent in a strange mix of over-sharing and anonymity. She didn't have ParentHacks.

So here's my favorite hack, for your use or amusement. It's very simple.

I keep a large cooler in the back of my minivan, so that I can feed my kids decent, healthy snacks or meals without hitting the drive-thru every single night.

See, I spend a ridiculous amount of time driving my kids from one activity to another. As kids get older, they get more and more activities, exponentially. Even for those of us who think that we are making an effort not to over-program our children, it just happens. I swear, one minute you're all "OMG Sally is such an overachiever helicopter mom with the karate and the cheer and the piano lessons and the basketball - does that kid ever just get to play in the yard?" and the next you're all "Oh gotta go, I have to run drop off the boys at soccer, then swimteam then feed them something and get them to cub scouts by 7 so they can race their Raingutter Regatta boat that we just built last night at 10pm."

Sometimes I have my own activities and meetings to go to. Then it gets really interesting.

Anyway, We do probably hit some kind of fast food drive-thru at least once a week. I try and use it as a rare reward, but some nights it just can't be helped. Calories are important to active kids. You can't drop a kid off at a sports practice and expect him to function for an hour on nothing but a granola bar. Funny enough, volunteer coaches don't really like your child when he's a starving basketcase melting into a pile of goo after only a few laps.

So, I keep a cooler in the car. Then, on the days we leave the house at 4:30pm and don't return until 8, I can have sandwiches, protein packed yogurt smoothies, cold Gatorade or G2, and fresh fruit ready to go.

The great thing is on those days we just hit the drive-thru for the ice cream. Kidding.

What's the matter with Kansas?

Hey folks, I'm Jenny, and I'm new here at Midwest Parents. Well, I'm not new to being a parent in the midwest, of course, I've been doing that for the better part of ten years.
Ten years.
OMG you guys I'm about to have a ten year old. Hold Me.

Ahem, sorry. Anyway, Glad to be on board. A little about me:

• I have two sons - age seven and almost TEN. (breathe.)

• I live in Kansas, in suburban Kansas City. Yes, most people do in fact think that Kansas City is in Missouri, and this is true, however we are one of those weird places where the "Greater Kansas City Area" actually spans two states, like 6 counties and umpteen cities. When I was a little girl growing up here, you could call across the state line, from one area code in Kansas to an area code on the Missouri side, without having to dial the area code first. And we had party lines! Remember party lines? You could call into some random number and get on the line with some random kid from some other random part of town and have a chat, a conversation, a talk. It was kind of like, oh I don't know, Twitter: The Analog Version.

• I drive a minivan. It is full of soccer balls, smelly cleats, and half empty water bottles that probably have bacteria growing under the lid. There may be a stray french fry or two under a seat, along with a missing arm to a Iron Man 2 Happy Meal toy. It does not, however, have one of those 3-D stickers on the back that looks like a small soccer ball broke the glass and got lodged there. Those are so five minutes ago. Now everyone seems to have those white outlined people stickers that used to be reserved for Calvin (as in, Calvin & Hobbes) peeing on Jeff Gordon's Nascar number. But I don't have one of those either.

• I do, however, have a license plate that says MAYHEM. I think that's fairly self-explanatory.

• I have a husband. He is busy. Right now, he's in Australia, for work.
  

• I don't mind him going to Australia for work, because every mile he flies across the ocean gets me closer to a free ticket to Maui. Fly Baby, Fly.

• I have a dog, he's a black standard poodle, named Max. He is younger than both my kids, and much more rotten. I'm not sure how that happened, I used to be good at training dogs. Then I had kids, and three years ago instead of having another baby, I got myself a dog.
  

• I do work outside the home, which you can totally tell if you were to ever actually visit my home, except every other Tuesday when a really nice man comes and cleans it for me. Then its nice for about five minutes, or until the school bus comes around the block. If you'd like to come by on one of these Tuesdays, between 3:30pm when the house cleaner is done and 3:45 when the monsters exit the bus, I'd be glad to show you around. Otherwise, just know that its gross, and that I really don't care much. No, you can't eat off my floors. But I don't really think anyone wants to do that anyway, so why keep them clean?

• Anyway, back to my working? I work at our church, I'm in charge of children's and youth ministries. I spent many years on the corporate track, albeit in a flexible environment, and trust me, this is much better.

So that's me, in a nutshell. My regular blog, which I've had for five and a half years, is called We're Not in Kansas Anymore, Toto. Yes, I know, I am actually in Kansas, but I started the blog because we were moving to San Diego, California, as a way to keep my family and friends up on what we were doing out there. Getting a lot of sand in every orifice of our bodies, turns out, is what we were doing out there. And we loved it. But we came home.

And so here we are.

Fear in Parenthood

There are many things that have scared me about parenthood. The very act of choosing to create a baby, wondering how that baby would come out of my body...even how I would feed that baby.

In hindsight these things seem minor to the frightening aspects of sending those children out into the world without you by their sides.

When my first child started Kindergarten it was after spending years in an environment where I knew the parents of her friends well, knew her teachers well because they were former coworkers, and felt a lot of control over her environment. Sending her to a school where I knew few (one) of the children, none of the teachers and had zero control over her environment was a big shock.

I cried uncontrollably each day I dropped her off at school for days. I mourned our days together. Now, someone else was spending more time with my child each day than I was. This still irks me. I want my kids with me more than they are with someone else.

That aside, the fears of parenthood grow in elementary school. There is bullying. There is bullying even if there is an excellent behavior plan (and there is at my kids' school). Kids can be so mean and I think they are meaner than ever.

I think there are excellent parents out there and I think there are many, many more sub-par parents than ever out there. If you take into consideration parenting in years past, parents didn't have to worry about things like they do now. Yes, you may worry that your child will survive infancy in the past. Modern medicine has made this a slim worry. Now, though, you have to worry about drugs, guns, bullying to the point your child commits suicide in desperation, etc. And where do those bullies, gun-toters, drug dealers come from? Well, I'd guess some of them come from homes like yours and mine. Yes, I believe there are kids out there that will do wrong no matter what their parents do. But there are those kids out there whose parents propped them in a corner holding their own bottles when they were 4 months old. There are the mothers who smoked pot or did crack or whatever while they were pregnant. There are the parents who strike their kids for any impudence.

My kids are spirited. They back talk. I consider the back talk a sign that they are growing, testing, but they still know that they will be loved no matter what they say.

I hope that my children can navigate the school years without bullying, without shame, with heads head high.

I can't guarantee anything. There is the fear.

Rocker babies wear jeans!

Beatles, Led Zepplin, JJ Cale, BB King - he is learning the greats...!

Lessons from Little Dude...

On April 9th, my position was eliminated, closing one chapter in my life and beginning another one. Since that time, I have been working hard at finding a new job, and starting our own business with my wife. And... I have been taking lessons.

As I have mentioned before, I have a little guy who is 20 months old... and with me being home more often during the day I have learned a lot from him. I thought I would share those lessons as it was a good reminder for me... so here are my lessons as learned from the Little Dude...

• Splash in the puddles... they are sure to bring squeals of delight and reminders of simpler times when we could be carefree.
• Stop and look at the bugs, poke your hands in the dirt and turn over leaves.
• Explore the world with wide open curiosity and awe... saw a sunset last night that was beautiful, a rainbow on Friday and a gazillion cool things in between
• Give hugs often... and kiss back with passion.
• Roll on the floor with toys and make sounds that are funny, and laugh.
• Show appreciation for food that is good - nothing like "yum" sung loudly while enjoying pancakes.
• Sing - whether you know the words or not - just sing along and enjoy it.
• Naps - ah naps. (Not that I have had a lot of time for these).
• When walking in the woods - find a stick. It can be your magic wand, walking stick, noisemaker, and picture drawer. What a great tool....
• If you don't like your clothes, get rid of them. There are more comfortable ones in the drawer.
• Laugh like you mean it... from the belly.

This is the short list of the many things he has reminded me of. To have that child like innocence and ability to look at the world through his eyes has been engaging, delightful and relaxing. These times could be extremely stressful, instead I am finding peace and enjoyment in the process. What a blessing to have the family I have and the opportunity to learn again...

Managing boys

Oh, Boys. Boys.

Boys.

I am so grateful to be a boy mama. They are maniacs, funny, turbulent, adorable, annoying, silly, and sweet. They are smart and yet do some of the dumbest things - like getting arms stuck in chairs or putting a variety of objects in noses and ears. They are explorers.

I teach High School, and this year I have a particular group of boys that remind me of mine. They are silly, annoying, and excessively sweet. They drive me crazy as they throw objects across the room at each other during my lunch. Yet, they respect me, my space, and my opinion. They hang out in my room because they are in need of another adult role model. They are in need of boundaries and acceptance. They are in need of a place to be and belong.

I'm honored my room is that place.

I was told by a good friend of mine that to be the place, "the place", that our children and their friends want to hang out at there are a few steps to do to ensure this.

1. stock the fridge on Fridays before school is out

2. make Fridays family night, but inclusive of friends

3. Always be in the kitchen baking or doing something right after school (while they eat)

4. don't say much and listen always

5. consistency - don't miss a Friday, even if there is a game or a dance - go to the game together and part ways for the dance.

I hope to keep these in the forefront of my mind as we continue toward adolescence at a staggering pace. In the meantime, when my silly boys need a hug, I hug them. When they ask to sit on my lap, I welcome them. When they ask for a good cry, a good prayer, a good meal, or a good laugh I make sure I am present to give it.

Oh goodness, time

How you fly past me. I have to apologize dear MWP readers, I have dropped the proverbial ball this week. I have been in one of those existential places in which the actual place in reality is skewed. Confused? Let me explain.

This is the time of year in Education where we are closing up the current year and starting to plan for the next year. This is the time of year where colleagues receive pink slips, students start to shut down, department chairs start looking for requests for next year's curriculum, and it is the time of year that drives me bonkers. On top of teaching High School English, my 1st grader is involved in field trips on which he would like my attendance, my daycare mom (bless her) is on medical leave for her son's surgery, and it is busy for Randy, my meteorological husband.

Spring has sprung...and I am in too many places in my brain and am missing places in my reality.

So I'm sorry, and I hope you will be able to forgive.

Do you have times that are like this for you? The annual school transition is one in which I cannot seem to just breathe through. I can breathe through the holiday madness. I can breathe through the beginning and end of school, but this transition is....muddy.

Like Spring.

Photographs from the past

I've made a habit in my homes of hanging photographs of family and friends in arrangements on the walls. I've had many different homes in my adulthood, since my daughter was born. Nine, to be exact. So I've had plenty of experience pulling the pictures out and rearranging them in a new space. And my family has changed dramatically over those years. I've been married and divorced and remarried. I've had to subtly change the composition of portraits to reflect this. Like every adult, I've also had to accommodate new nieces and nephews and, in the last year, a new baby in our nuclear family. Suffice it to say, I've pulled out the photographs and the frames and mattes more times than I choose to share, tried to thoughtfully and tastefully put together a collection, and selected locations in the house to hang them together.

The truth is, the last few years have been rough waters for establishing a household. When we got married almost five years ago, my husband and I lived in two different homes in two different states. In the midst of this arrangement, when we finally got it together to have most of our stuff together in his apartment and call that our permanent address, I was commuting over 500 miles to work for a year. During this time, a few, carefully selected photographs, ones of us and my daughter, got put on the wall for a couple years. But the rest of our family pictures got stored in boxes in the basement of his apartment. We moved into our current home 18 months ago, but within a month of moving, we discovered I was pregnant. High risk pregnancy, me working fulltime, finally taking medical leave, and a teenager in her first year of high school...it all led to a stalling of the settling into our new home.

At the end of July, we lost my father-in-law. Three weeks later, our daughter was born. All the while, we were taking photographs of family.

Recently, photographs have come back into my life. I don't mean digital images that I scroll through on my computer screen. I mean real, honest-to-goodness photographs. The kind you hold in your hands. The kind you find in your desk drawer years after you forgot it was even taken. The kind you write on the back of, so you make sure that years after you forgot it was even taken, you remember the whos, whats, whens, wheres, and whys. The kind you carefully frame and place in a coveted spot, so you feel good every time you see it. You get the idea. It clearly had been a void in my life of late and I was craving a physical connection with our loved ones near and far.

It started by getting ready for my daughter's 16th birthday. Her birthday was two months ago, in February. So in December, I decided I would put together a slideshow for her and show it at the party. Since I didn't own a digital camera until she was nine, I found myself on the bedroom floor with photo boxes and albums and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of photographs lying in piles all around. I sorted and organized, and pared down my selections. Finally, after a couple days, I set to scanning all the photographs. 500 in all. When the whole project was done and we showed the collection at her party, I cried through the whole show.

Of course, sorting through the old photos looking for good ones of my oldest daughter didn't stop there. I found photographs from high school and family vacations (both from childhood and from adulthood), snapshots taken while on school field trips and over camping trips with the church youth group, bachelorette parties and wedding parties and tea parties and on and on and on. A photograph of my grandfather's orange trees that he sent to me while I was in middle school. A few of my best friend who moved away, the ones she mailed to me to show me her new hair cut. One a boyfriend took of me on a hiking trip; the expression on my face says it all.

I'll admit, it's a bit overwhelming. That saying, "a picture is worth a thousand words," I've come to have a new appreciation for that. Being confronted with a visual record of the past bombards my memories with the reality of those moments. Our memories can be flawed and sentimental. Photographs tend to shed light on those flaws and bring back to life the actual moments you'd rather forget. In the midst of this, I added the following phrase to my facebook page: "Walking down memory lane and getting in touch with your past is really not all that rewarding as people may think. Live for today, I say." It was a way to remind myself that these memories, this past, it makes me who I am today. It makes our family something unique. Really, the only thing I can take away from the past is a reminder to live every moment in the here and now, because that's all that matters.

So this week I'm off to the craft store to find frames for the last remaining photographs of our family. I'll frame them and place them on the wall in another arrangement, just in time to share with friends when they visit for an afternoon party this Thursday. I'm sure my husband and I will spend some time talking during the party, explaining, "this is my sister-in-law Ana" and "this is a childhood picture of my grandfather" and "this was taken the day my husband moved to the United States." Through it all, I have to keep in mind that this moment, the one in which I am breathing air circling around me, this is the one that matters most.

Memorize the Good Stuff

It's so easy to project the image of the happy little family.  We edit our words, written and oral, as we tell our families' stories to the world.  But let's not kid ourselves.  We all have issues.  Some are run-of-the-mill problems, the kind that nearly every parent recognizes when we're honest enough to share the stories.  Bedtime dilemmas.  Potty-training horrors.  Hitting or biting or simply not sharing at all.  Some problems are bigger, harder to deal with, harder to share.

And our kids grow, their issues do, too.  Peer influence.  Poor choices.  Driving and drinking and all those other things we worry about.

So I don't make this suggestion in any way shape or form to sound like we have it all goin' on over here at our house.  Like all of you, we are trying our best and dealing with the problems and issues as they come.

But as we work through this thing called parenting, one of the practices we've found most helpful is to have the kids memorize bible verses.  We print one out for the week (or two, or three if it's really long) and put it on the fridge.  Part of the dinner conversation is taking turns practicing the verse.  When everyone has it, we move on to the next one.  We also see who can remember the previous verses.  The kids enjoy the challenge, and we find it extremely useful to refer to the verses they know--to talk about them, and what they mean, and how to apply them--when the tougher times come around.

Challenges of Child Spacing

There are several aspects of having three children that I hadn’t considered or properly realized until recently. In my case, my two older children are just that, older.

While the spacing between my second and third children was not planned to be almost 4 years, that is how it worked out and for the most part it is working just fine. We don’t know any differently.

However, one challenge of having the third child so much younger than the other two is that as a toddler she wants to do everything her siblings do even if she physically can’t do it yet. Her siblings climb the tall slides at the parks or the indoor bounce house and D wants to join them. Nevermind that there are things just her size that she can do…it’s just not the same. Her frustration at her own size and limitations is evident in the squawks and screeches and the boneless protests of being led away from the “big kid” things.

I imagine I felt some of the same frustrations as a toddler, wanting to follow my older brother around and being just a little too small to do what I wanted. My brother is also almost 4 years older than I, like K is almost 4 years older than D.

Although the age difference is a bit challenging right now, I know that it will not always be so. By the time D turns 3 she will be running and jumping with her siblings and cousins without problem. She is close to that point already and she’s not quite two.

Before I know it, my three children will be running in a pack together, forgetting what it was like to be an only, or one of two, taking for granted that there are the three.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.