LOST A SOCK

Waking up in Vegas

Earlier this month last month I started to get on a blogging kick and even considered NaBloPoMo, a commitment to write every day of November.  Alas, we took a trip and returned home seven days ago already.  We arrived home from Vegas at 3am Halloween morning, grabbing just a few hours of sleep before it was time to carve pumpkins and get everyone ready for trick or treating.  Since then, I painted my family room, got the kids caught up on school and a couple fun field trips, went on a major post-Halloween sugar binge, conquered both Angry Birds and a mountain of laundry, read a fantastic book and ordered my East Africa travel guide, to help myself think.

So yes, we took our trip.

Vegas was pretty neat to see.  

We were celebrating our wedding anniversary, so my wonderful husband took it upon himself to have special surprises built into the trip, like a massage down at the spa on our first morning, chocolate strawberries and champagne, and a marvelous anniversary dinner.

A dinner that included three varieties of mashed potatoes in pretty little cups, steak, lobster and creamed spinach.  Fun.     

(Also, writing the word Fun just after the words Creamed Spinach totally made me realize I am rocking my thirties.  Or my eighties.  Whatever.)

Vegas is one of Kevin's favorite places.  He loves the history of downtown and the architectural influences of each of the hotels on the Strip.  He knows what time certain fountains go off and who houses this art or that, and where to play good Blackjack and where to play cheap Blackjack, and where Dean Martin ate cheeseburgers.  And so while normally I am the trip planner of our team, this one was all his.

We walked and walked and walked.  I can tell you that I don't think we missed a single stop because that man was determined to show me everything.  

My favorite was this hotel, The Palazzo, and just as I was oohing and ahhing over how they pulled off Fall leaves in the middle of a desert, he told me that this was where we had our original reservation, just before he changed us to Mandalay Bay.  Oh well. 

Mandalay Bay was a great pick for my first visit because we were near the end of the Strip, with a view of the whole thing from way up on the 38th floor.  We stayed at THEhotel, which is kind of a big deal to them. THE word THE.  It's in capital letters on their pens, their towels, their shampoo.  On every paper, every sign on every wall.

I walked around the whole first morning proclaiming that I was getting out of THEbed and drinking THEdietcoke from THEoverpricedminibar and getting in THEshower.  Would he please get THEcar from THEvalet?

Am not kidding.  THEbig deal.  THEtp.

Am so glad I did not have THEexperience where I forgot to remove THEsticker.

We rented a fun car on our trip, which Kevin originally thought completely unnecessary, until I reassured him that if we were going to be so close to mountains and landscapes, I would probably need to climb on them.  

Which brings us to my favorite part of our adventure.  

Sorry friends, I do not enjoy gambling, or smoking cigars or drinking much, so while the Vegas sites were fun to see, the desert mountains were where my heart was.  (My vices, just for the record, include mashed potatoes, heavy caffeine and now banana splits the size of my forearm from Caesars Palace, all of which we indulged in while in the city of flashing lights.)

In our quest to see all fifty states together, I was aware that Las Vegas is in the Southeast corner of Nevada, quite close to Arizona and Utah...and we need all three of those.  Originally I had hoped that we could actually make a trip within a trip, out to THEgrandcanyon, but I knew we would not be able to dedicate enough of THEtime to do it THEjustice (heh, sorry!) so we decided to head up through Arizona and into Utah for hiking in those gorgeous red mountains.  

All lava rock, in such enormity- I had never seen anything like it.  See the two tiny cars up ahead in relation to the rock?  Compare.  

Fantastic.

So we made it through Arizona and into St. George, Utah, and I spotted a white church in the distance, which is one of my favorite things to photograph.  This wasn't any white church, though- it was a Mormon Temple!  And we'd never visited one! (Life List #61) There was a wedding spilling onto the perfect green grass of the front lawn, beneath the endless blue sky, and then this pristine, white building.  It sort of reminded me of winter mornings when you get that massive snowfall overnight, and then are lucky enough to wake up to bright blue skies over all of that bright white, untouched snow.  This was that. Church-style.

We moved on to Snow Canyon State Park, then, to hike.  I was so taken with the red rock, experiencing nothing like it near home.  It was so brittle and porous, with randomly scattered piles of deep black basalt rock here and there. Even all of the plants were completely unfamiliar to me, hardy and spikey and just completely different from the Midwest.  I loved it, and this is what I love about travel.  It changes you, and broadens your mind and deepens your understanding of the world.

The rock was somewhat unfriendly to the touch, reminding me a bit of chalk, which is not my favorite texture.  So this hike was for looking.  As we went along we kept finding the most incredible formations, and naming them like kindergartners identifying cloud shapes in the sky.

Owl!  

Elephant!  

This is how people stay married for a hundred years.  We entertain our quirks. And eat creamed spinach on our anniversaries.

This is my favorite shot from the Utah part of our trip- it sums up perfectly what the atmosphere was.  It was quiet.  It was awe-inspiring.  It was enormous, and dry and seventy-five degrees without even the slightest breeze and you got the feeling that things were simply permanent, and unchanging.  It was the kind of silence and stillness that allows you to stand right in the middle and not even have to breathe deeply to clear your mind.  You are just clear and quiet and synced with this stable, untouched section of the planet.  And you realize that it is you that is moving, all of your blood and your systems and your whole existence contained within your physical being, faster than any of this. You are transforming so quickly, and you will be gone and all of this rock and sand and dry desert heat will remain and outlive you.  And it is perfect.

You love my quasi-spiritual nature-hiking rants, don't you?

Late that night we returned to the glitz and the party in the downtown section of Vegas, which is Kevin's favorite.  It was then that my brain registered that it was Halloween weekend and the tourists?  They were costumed for it.  I think it was some of the best people watching I've ever done-- Snoop Dog, Beetlejuice, Kiss, The Pope smoking a big ol' cigar, and even a real wedding where every member of the wedding party, including the bride and groom, were made up like Zombies.  This was all so much fun to observe.

This is where a Zombie and a guy dressed like Tom Cruise from Risky Business take pictures of the Zombie wedding.  Oh Vegas.

I will be back send my husband and his buddies back to see you someday soon.

Not Perfect

This week marks our tenth and final week of summer camp for the year, leaving us with little more than a week or two for school-free afternoons.  We are in the home stretch, with brand new boxes of crayons and washable markers, piles of age-appropriate workbook, and curricula--- almost typed and printed out for future, frequent reference. 

Last spring I imagined that the summer would be busy, and that it would also allow time for staying close to home.  And there was that, a bit.  Marin mastered about fifty percent of the upper-case alphabet, and potty training, we played lots of Memory and snoozed on the couch during a handful of afternoons… because finally the teacher was off, and we could.  Part of me wishes to share that I hauled baskets filled with wet sheets and beach towels out to my laundry lines in the effort to save the Planet from dryer-overuse as I had in summers’ past, and that we walked our nearby trail more, but we did a bit less of those things this summer.  

We swam—we did that a lot.  And we did roller coasters, bouncy houses, splash pads, hot dogs and cauliflower on the grill.  Concerts, museums, playdates, overnights, vacations-- we did those, too.  We were out exploring the world and enjoying our people this summer, for sure.  We were away from home so much sometimes that I felt like I was barely seeing my bed, let alone the evening comforts of my living room couch, before it was time to get up and begin the next day.  

I did manage to shower every morning, except one, before camp drop-off. {Great success.}

A funny thing happened this summer, though, as it sometimes does when we get really busy: I had to let some things be.  You know what I’m talking about—running out to this or that and often leaving a mess behind as we exited.  And when we returned home to those tasks, I sometimes chose to read, nap or meditate first, instead of hopefully later or not at all, once the mundane tasks were crossed off my list.

Those two taunting words, bad mom, often crept in with this rebellious permission, as the kids battled with light sabers and each other in the back yard while I bounced around the Internet within earshot of them, but not engaging.  I sometimes wondered if Kevin thought I wasn’t keeping up with my end of some mythical spousal agreement we do not actually have, where I expend my every ounce of energy on collecting dirty dishes.  I have spent years running myself silly with homeschool and engage with each of the kids all day long, and in the little cracks of time in between keeping our laundry very folded and our pantry very stocked and our checking account very balanced.  And then if there was time later, generally in the middle of the night, I could read or meditate or write a blog entry.  

I am learning to re-prioritize and balance, and to choose my self when it is applicable, just like my kids do effortlessly for themselves all day long.             {They are really onto something.}

Letting go of that need to prove I can do it all is not a new concept. I have been fiddling with it for as long as I have been a mom, as is so common in our culture, but it became a non-negotiable in these recent months, and oddly something I had to learn—that my imperfections could serve as a way to access freedom, and even as an invitation to be loved.  I am sometimes guilty of saying the wrong things, forgetting what I had promised to do, taking too long to respond to emails, and now occasionally I plop down on the couch when there is potential work to be done.  And I ask silently for what all of us are really looking for in our messy, imperfect lives-- please love me anyway.     

Truthfully, I realized that maybe the issue wasn’t so much that my house was always so clean, because clearly not with three active children, but instead it was the scathing, unkind judgments that I had been laying upon myself for what I considered Not Perfect.  

Truly, the story of Leo Buscaglia that I love so much, with the fall leaves scattered about his living room floor, has become my own story this summer, only with scattered pairs of sandals in front of the closet doors and overflowing recycle cans—as evidence that we were busy out in the world experiencing, and that when we are at home, we are living first and upkeeping second.  I am finding the balance here, slowly and with new footing.

A work in progress, friends.

On raising one or eighty-nine children

It should come as no surprise, given that which is on our current radar, that Kevin and I have spent the last week or so with a sampling of our parenting skills, life goals, strengths and weaknesses squished between two rectangular pieces of glass (doused in a little purified water, of course) as to be seen through a microscope.  We have conversed until our voices grew hoarse and bounced our most honest thoughts off of the most trusted people in our lives. I've asked the whole wide world in general to say a little prayer for our family as we make the right decision for the seven of us, and I am so grateful to those who did.

I have been thinking a lot (oh shush, you love it when I philosophise endlessly) about what it means to be a good mom and a good dad in regards to who should be raising five children, and whether *we* should be those people. To me, good parenting involves complete dedication to our marriage and family.  It requires the desire to be constantly growing and learning.  Most of all, we have to love what we are dedicating ourselves to.

Raising one or three or five or ten children is often tiresome, frustrating work. I was just as prone to feel defeated by the developmentally appropriate antics of my first child as I am to sometimes feel stressed by my three.  I had never been the mother of one before, or two or three, until I was.  And then at every given moment conditions in my house were as complicated as they ever had been before.  And as is common, I had the most opinions about child raising before I had children, and it has been a continual process of breaking down and blowing up those unrealistic notions ever since.

Having kids makes no sense, on paper.  You take two adults in (hopefully) satisfying careers, each of whom are bringing home a paycheck, mostly in control of their days and making choices as to where and what and when they eat and sleep and what becomes of spare time.  And then you bring home your first baby, and then another, and you give up most of that.  One of you either parts with income via checks written to childcare or by putting off a career to tackle each daytime yourself, and the rest of said income is to be divided between the cereal aisle of grocery stores and co-pays at the pediatrician's office.  Sleep, the temperature of dinner and how free time is spent revolves mostly around kids, then, and control is no longer control in the former sense of the word...at all. In choosing to give up so much "freedom," there is definitely something internal-- something bigger, at play.  And for as difficult a task child raising can be, I challenge you to find a parent that doesn't consider his or her child one of the most important, wonderful parts of life.

By the time you become outnumbered by children, something naturally has to give.  You either adapt (continually) and decide to see your life through new eyes, or you fight the noise and the messes and eventually have yourself committed.  I don't care who you are raising, children make messes, screech, bicker, fuss, and embarrass their parents.  Also, they give the best hugs with little arms, say the funniest things, create the most amazing artwork you've seen and steal your heart over and over by doing nothing more than just being the beautiful little souls that they are.  

We sort of know what we are signing up for with our fourth and fifth babies. And the rest will be learned through reading and asking and experience.  I am not to three, nor will I be to five children, a perfect mother.  I am sometimes forgetful and impatient, and am far from having all of the answers.  But I love my kids, and I love raising a family.  I am fully dedicated to this family I helped create and that is enough.  Enough to homeschool, enough to keep up with everyone's interests, enough to give back rubs at night and read stories mid-afternoon, and to find pediatric specialists and physical therapists and speech pathologists.  I love these children enough to continue on my own path of personal growth, so that they can always have the best version of me.

I will rely on my kind girlfriends, who are empathetic and in the trenches of motherhood alongside me, for a non-judgmental shoulder to cry on.  And I will try to remember when I am exhausted and overwhelmed that we will not have three babies under three forever.  In the same vein, my children will go on doing what they do.  They will be funny and wild and sweet, and eat my Chap Sticks and wake me up fourteen times each night.  They will be ungrateful and sassy at times-- all five of them if this is who we are meant for, and not one of them will owe me anything.  No matter what, our crew will grow up with a strong sense of family, and hopefully understand that it isn't what you've got, but who you are.

If we hadn't done it by diving head first into homeschooling, by becoming a party of seven my family is taking a deliberate step away from what is typical by American standard.  There will be people who know us, and complete strangers, who not only won't understand why we make certain choices, but some of the same people who will outright disapprove.  And that's fine.  I am not asking anyone to feed my children, fund their educations or even take interest in one, if not all of these precious people.  We all have the choice to answer or not when we feel God calling our names, and I can only do what feels right in my heart.  And that is the best explanation I can give, if nothing that makes a lick of logical sense on a spreadsheet, for how we got to where we are right now.

Twas the day after Christmas...

Twas the day after Christmas and all through the house,

Not a soul had slept in, not even my spouse.

The shreds of the wrapping were tossed here and there,

Boxes under my feet, scotch tape in my hair.

The children were glued to the screen with the Wii,

New Mario, new Football, a DS playing spree!

What the heck are you doing, I begged of my clan,

And they looked at me puzzled, in fear of my plan.

Snow deep in the yard, casserole dried to each dish,

Legos spread far and wide, magic wand my first wish.

A hope and a wish and miraculous prayer, 

Beseeching the tot that a nap might be there.

At one o’clock, two o’clock, three, I don’t care.

An hour of silence or four is quite fair.

Holiday cookies for breakfast, more casseroles for lunch,

Larger pants on Monday for the whole snacking bunch.

New Year’s Eve party Friday and then Jack turns Five,

Holy God will I make it through hosting, alive?

Then up in the bedrooms arose such a clatter,

That I climbed from the laundry to see what was the matter.

Cinderella, they shouted, and My Little Pony!

The girl is trashing our loot, they did grumble and groany.

Snow White wed Luigi, she made Skywalker drink tea,

She messed up my bed! What’s that smell?  Did she pee?!

Oh sister, toddler, go play with your own,

Or bother our mother- just throw us a bone.

Where is your father?!  I then shrieked with delight,

He is off work today!  And should handle this fight!

Then what to my wondering eyes should appear,

But my husband with Bears game and bottle of beer.

We should relax, he proclaimed without doubt,

And I wondered what the hell this Relax was about.

No laundry or cooking or trash?  I did shout.

Just leave it a mess, he said-- then I passed out.

Then spouse and three children, they dragged me to bed, 

dropped my limbs, bruised my ribs, set my book by my head.

I began to recover, moved blissfully to read.

The children, they lived, ate Gramma’s brownies with speed.

Tomorrow is different, we’ll get back on our task,

And if they don’t help, a swift kick to the…ask.

Enjoy your new toys and don’t clean your house,

If you need forcing I’ll lend you my spouse.

A new sort of post-Christmas, I proclaim with delight,

Relaxation to all—I think I just might.

It's beginning to look a lot like...

...mmmhmmmm.  Christmas!

Every little while KJ says to me again, Mom, can you believe we are only (number) days away from Christmas?  They're out on break right now, whatever that means to homeschoolers, and we've been filling our days with festive activities to keep us out of trouble spirits bright.  We are so excited about Christmas this year, and I'm not sure why but I feel acutely more sensitive this year to how happy we are, and how blessed.

One evening, recently, eight of us piled into our large vehicle-- Kevin and I and the kids, my sister and Leslie and my girlfriend Mary, and we went Christmas light seeing.  Our friend had shared a book of Chicago's best lit houses with us, so we plugged one address after the next into our GPS and shared a great night together.

We stopped along the way for hot chocolate and donuts, and ended up having a very silly dance party in an emptied out Dunkin Donuts, hours past the kids' bedtime.

I also took the kids to see the trees from around the world at the Museum of Science and Industry, something I have been wanting to do for at least a couple years now.  In fact, last year we visited the museum just after Christmas and the large foyer was stacked with crates containing the holiday trees-- a double bummer.

This was our year no matter what, and we weren't disappointed.  We got together with a few of our homeschool friends and spent the day there, together-- getting in for free on the family pass of one of our generous friends, even.  Double awesome.

When I posted the above picture to my facebook this morning, I wrote that it was myself and my best three Christmas gifts every year.  How grateful I am to raise these people and do what I do, every day. 

I feel like this little (then sleepy) pumpkin has been getting some bad press lately, obviously at my own hand, but I should take a moment to clarify that she is the sweetest little girl I could ever have imagined raising.  And in spite of her two-year-old antics and our rising costs of gauze pads and doorknob guards, we are making it along just fine.  After my last entry I was waiting for someone to pop in with a, When she's sixteen and chucking Goodnight Moon over the plastic gate in her bedroom doorway, DON'T SAY I DIDN'T WARN YOU, BAD FAILURE MOTHER YOU.  Sheesh, friends.

I think the toddler years are so unique in the adorableness and consternation that exist side by side with each other, that I sort of can't help share. Sometimes I am tearing my hair out, sometimes I am basking in unconditional love offered by this baby girl, and other times I'm like, Holy Shit, did you see that?  She just whapped that sassy kid in the bounce house upside his head and I have wanted to do that for at least the last hour.  It's the missing social cues that make situations both so frustrating and entertaining.  This is exactly why we loved Chris Farley.  Who here has not wanted to flop backwards and wail in the checkout line when it is a thousand people long and your coat becomes itchy and sweaty?  On the average day I can pretty easily conjure up five or seven adults off the top of my head who still rival my a two year old's temper tantrums.  Though, okay, not many are still taking their pants off in the karate viewing room.

Our girl is all about the holiday cheer this year, learning to sing Christmas songs in the car and baking cookies with Gramma.  She is trying to figure out this Santa guy, who I am positive will not fail to satisfy her every Christmas whim, if he is, ahem, anything like her father in the Disney Store.  I dare any brave soul speak the words Budget or Impulse Control to that man with the pink glittery Snow White bag over his shoulder.

Impulse control whaaa?

Only about seventeen hundred times a day, with each cookie baking afternoon, Christmas movie night and child present I wrap, my mind keeps going to our new baby.  This, 2011, is our year, for sure.  We will have our referral- a match with our baby.  It went out in our Christmas card and is worn on my heart every single day even when I am not speaking it aloud.  Where is he right now?  We will have him this year.  I keep wondering when the referral will happen, which month we will fly to Africa for the first time, in what season we will finally bring him or her home to join this family who has already, for a year, been celebrating the addition of our well-loved baby, if not his or her physical presence just yet.  I so hope our family ornament includes six little characters next year.

Most often Jack is the one who asks what our baby is doing in Ethiopia right now, and if Santa will visit there.  It's a very difficult concept to explain to a four year old, one I want to be both honest about but in the same vein not unnecessarily damaging in explaining.  I hope that we can ponder this question through different, healing eyes next year, and that we will have our feet on a more solid platform from which we can better help rectify the sadness and injustice that plagues this amazing, magical world.

Can you imagine the damage Kevin will do in the Disney Store next year, for that little sweetheart?  Our baby deserves every good thing the world can offer, and then some. 

Christmas Eve is just two days away.  No, KJ, I cannot believe it.  I am so happy, too.  With all of the holiday cheer and big hopes for the coming days and months, and hosting our very first Christmas for the whole family, I am as always, eternally grateful.  

Is snow. Is cold. Is Midwest. Is not manageable.

I remember being a kid and hearing grown-ups complain about the snow.  I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where up and down city blocks people dug out their parking spaces and marked them like historic warriors might mark castles they had taken, jabbing large symbolic flags atop the highest tower with a grunt and a fist pump, only in Chicago it's done beside a concrete curb...with old kitchen chairs.  (You heard me.)  Aah the city, what a pretty time of year. Also there, snow was white for about five minutes, and you had to enjoy the untouched freshness of it then because in no time it became a dirty charcoal-colored slush along every street.  I still loved it all as a kid.

Of course now I am a mother to three children of my own, and I fully understand what the grown-ups were complaining about.  Every time the kids and I so much as make a quick run to the post office, or worse, Christmas shop, bulky sweatshirts, coats, hats, mittens and boots are involved. Then at least one child must shed all of those layers because he has to pee.  And you can forget the idea that even one of three children might make it to the car (which has now been warming up in the driveway for twenty-seven minutes while you bundled said children) without throwing snow, falling in snow, losing a glove or boot in snow, or being blasted by snowballs.  And we've not even gotten in the car yet, or tried to get buckles done over bulky coats.  Also, we've not driven anywhere, yet...sliding in the snow. 

We've hardly left the house in three days now, which is an insane concept for my family.  We are always on the go, somewhere.  (But oh the effort involved here.)  Ironically, my boys can't get enough outside time, despite the wind and fresh flakes and twelve degree temperatures.

Fine.  We will agree to your ridiculous layering ideas if only you will open the door for us.  

Why, look.  A snow drift.  What ever shall I do with it?

Common sense: Face Plant.

And joy!

This guy is actually the bigger outdoor enthusiast of the two.  

I tried, I really did try, to keep them inside where it was warm when all of this frigid snow business began.  Truthfully, it takes almost as long to double up on socks, snowpants and locate matching snowball-thick gloves as it does to play outside, and then once they come back in, everyone strips down and runs upstairs for new clothing, leaving me a heaping, sopping pile to contend with.  

They are pretty happy to come back in when I call them, though, when I observe that their noses and cheeks have reached an adequate shade of red and their play has slowed, because they know there will be hot chocolate.

It's an agreement I once made with myself, that I will give them certain norms that they can one day look back on favorably.  And coming in from the snowy yard always means mugs of hot chocolate on the table, with marshmallows heaped ceiling-high, and a spoon to eat them with, of course.  A dollop of Cool Whip stirred in, if we have any on hand.

Our mother was forever nagging us about clearing our dishes from the table and picking up the endless array of oww my foot, dammit tiny lego pieces from every square inch of the house, they will say, but at least the hot chocolate was well-marshmallowed.  

And then I will have served my purpose on this Earth.

This one (a fashionista, indeed, this one) knows all about the hot chocolate deal as well.  Just as soon as she finishes eating up all of the snow that has fallen in the door (don't judge) she too begins begging for marshmallows and choc-yet juju.

I believe the unspoken portion of the winter deal I made with myself is that no child shall play out in the snow until he or she can trudge through it on his or her own.  Toddler snow play?  Daddy's terrain.

(Have I ever told you how physically cold I am, all the time, ever since I lost almost a hundred pounds a few years ago?  The same is true for my sister Sant, who lost her weight at that same time.  We are cold, constantly.)

We are going to take these grey-white days one little hour at a time. Thankfully after the quiet that was the last three days, which had me climbing the walls and wrapping Christmas gifts a full week early, we have a flurry of activity to look forward to in the next week, including the Museum of Science & Industry's Christmas Trees from around the world, our annual Christmas Lights night in the car with Sant & Leslie, cookies with Gramma and gingerbread houses with Honey, our annual holiday movie day and finally, hosting our first Christmas.  I hope for the sake of my kids that everything remains white.  They are really pulling for a white Christmas, and it's looking pretty favorable.

Then it can all melt away until next December, yes?  A Midwestern girl can dream.

Pressure Release Valve

A month ago already, just after we traveled out East, I received an email asking how we manage extended road trips with young children.  I kept thinking after that how neat it would be to write a post talking about stops and stretches every couple hours, the way we are really forced to live flexibly for those couple weeks, and when all else fails blast some fun music or read a story.  The potential post began to morph in my brain, then, into how I am managing to homeschool with three young children-- an equally difficult task if I’ve ever seen one.  

So, late two nights ago I sat down to write about what I would title (in a most worn-out manner) How To Accomplish Anything At All With Young Children, and then just as I got comfy with my laptop, Jack woke up with frantic complaints of a stomach ache.  My brain leapt at once from relaxed blog-writing sunshine and unicorns into vomit-panic mode, a person well versed in the devastation that One Child With A Stomach Bug wreaks on a family of five (heh, particularly the maid matriarch of said family) and the writing of the post was again delayed.

Finally now, another few days later, I shall answer the question of how to do anything as the mother of young children, from road trip to homeschool to writing a blog entry in less than three days:  

Good.  Luck.

My friends, I would have been certain in my earlier days of motherhood that I would be better equipped to handle certain calamities by now.  Everything would be brand new with my first child, every day, every age, of course, but at least by the third time I was wading in the icy, perilous, shark infested waters that are the Terrible Twos, I should be equipped to ride them out as a calm, well-experienced ship captain.  

But they didn't coin them Terrible for nothing.  And the toddler-- she is drowning the ship captain, one small drop of water at a time.

For a while I had been saying that raising three children is a handful, especially when their father works long-extended hours and I am the sole parent on call through all their waking hours.  We are homeschoolers, which adds to my already full plate the great responsibility of All Education- everything from science projects to art concepts to retelling the history of the world from start to present.  It is not convenient to get out when the weather turns cold.  No one wants to concoct breakfast, lunch and dinner every single day around a flurry of scheduled activities that rivals that of three simultaneous Olympic Hurdle events.  But I no longer believe it is all of those things distressing me so.  I think I could manage my eight- and four-year-old's school, activities, meals and laundry without much difficulty.  And someday I will add Marin into that mix of "manageable," I hope, once she makes it out of these tumultuous toddler times.

I vaguely remember feeling this way with Jackson a few years ago- like a complete and utter failure of a parent when it came to Toddler Management. (Heh, maybe instead this entry should be a celebration: Raising Baby Jack Didn't Kill Me!)  Specifically this evening in the tiny sitting room at Karate as I physically wrestled my girl, who had removed her shoes and socks and was red-faced screaming, kicking and flailing, disturbing the quiet class in progress and audience of attentive parents, I recalled chasing my two-year-old son down his brother's quiet preschool hallway as teachers disapprovingly closed doors to shield their students from my son's echoing screeches, as he desperately and angrily insisted that he too should have a try at fifth grade Science, or a quick dip in the germy water fountain or the bleachy bucket in the janitor's closet.

In the same vein, my two-year-old girl has mastered the zipper on crib tent, which was once the answer to her acrobatic nightly escapes, and she is again roaming the house.  She is refusing sleep at all costs to the both of us, and I am just plain exhausted.  In my days with two-year-old KJ I might have opted to just stay home with him, day after day at only a cost to myself, but that is no longer an option when the girl with the Iron Will abides alongside active older siblings-- and therein lies the Mount Everest of our life in the present day: How can everyone have a little something?  KJ's growing up will not wait for our youngest child to comprehend social expectations, and therefore I cannot have him (or Jack) lose out on wonderful opportunities simply because maintaining a quiet, well-behaved toddler during said activities is like asking a frog to please not bump his ass when he hops.  

Which leads me to the driver's seat of my car, finishing my quick lunchmeat sandwich as we cross the state line for a weekly (loved) homeschool gathering, holding a well-iced Diet Coke to my throbbing forehead as it begs for just a few more hours of sleep and respite from the meltdown-worthy frustration, all while praying to God that she would just doze off already for this last leg of the drive so that I can have five minutes of peace before I chase her around, again, for the next four hours.  She never sleeps, and I spend the drive counting my blessings in hopes that I can pull myself together enough to make it through just this afternoon and evening until bedtime.  Maybe she will sleep, then. Maybe I will, too.

My friend reminded me today that all of these miserable baby-raising scenarios somehow melt into the cobwebby backs of our brains over time and we begin to romanticize what it is to be in the trenches.  Even from Jackson to Marin I had forgotten so many things.  But I am going to do this again, and somehow I will survive that too and come away from it a better soul.  Or at least that is my hope.  I am learning through much reading, listening, meditation and practice how to calm myself in the face of mayhem, though I am far from perfecting it. I no longer worry about the unsympathetic opinions of nay-sayers who told me I brought these difficult days on myself, or that the easy solution would be to pop my kids back into traditional school, or stop having more altogether.  Instead I have learned to lean on even the idea of the handful of wonderful, supportive select individuals closest to me who serve as my comfortable, welcoming couch and soft blanket where I can rest when I am so tired from all of this good and challenging business.  

It is so tangible to me that I could put it on bread and eat it for lunch, this understanding that anything worth doing-- anything that will really expand us and strengthen us as people, is going to be both difficult and amazing at the very same time.  And raising children, I think, is an extreme example of this concept.  What an amazing, exciting, unconditional love I feel for my children even in the moments where they test me to the last threads of my patience. What can I give them in the ruins of this exhausted, messy, overwhelming morning?  All I can do is explain to them that I have been up all night and that I am so tired, and that I need help to pull this thing together so we can get out of the house.  

I have stopped hoping for easier and continue searching for better tools, and this is what will make the difference.  One foot in front of the other, and this too shall pass, right?

The absolute apple of my eye, and also the reason for the dark circles beneath them.

It's my kid in a box

Do your kids play in cardboard boxes?  

Laundry baskets, maybe?

Light sabers out of empty tubes?

Prefer playing in the late Fall pots of dirt to enjoying the pretty Summer flowers? 

Find random spools of ribbon and make fifteen kinds of necklaces and bracelets and decide the only possible use for the leftover ribbon can be to hang post-Halloween ghosts above the stairs?  (Successfully frightening the daylights out of their father at 4:30am, might I add.)

For whatever reason, my kids have always been crazy about playing in cardboard boxes.  And with the beginning of Christmas present shipments rolling in, there has been a Cardboard Feeding Frenzy in our house.  They cut and color and tape (and tape and tape and tape some more) to make cars, houses, ships, you name it.  Last week they constructed a multi-room hotel up in the backyard playhouse, complete with Diet Pepsi box picnic table where they enjoyed lunch.

This week in our High Five Magazine Jack spotted an illustration of kids creating another sort of house in a giant cardboard box, with an opening door and a window.  And then the very next day Amazon.com found the largest box possible to ship a very small Christmas gift, and a new house was born.  

This time, Marin had plenty of space on her balcony to hang out her linens while they dried.

Might as well enjoy a little Ayn Rand while the laundry dries, eh?

Maybe I've been going about this all wrong after all.  Maybe we really should try gifting the kids shipping boxes, wrapping paper and tape for Christmas this year.  

Win, win.

Reasons to smile

We received an offer on our little old house this week.  It was from the young couple that walked through in the first few days we hit the market last month. We countered the offer, and it was accepted.  It was accepted!!  Assuming that all goes smoothly, we should close by the end of next month.

My dear friend Bree and her husband Luke?  Are joining our family in the Parents Outnumbered By Children Club.  I cannot express how much our excited, blissful conversations about this beautiful new baby have brightened my week.

I am so blessed with people in my life who are beyond supportive-- whatever the term is for people with whom you can be so unapologetically honest, who feel so safe and are without hesitation willing to scrape you up from the proverbial puddle you've melted into on the floor before their feet, suddenly and without warning. These are the friends we all need in our lives, and I am so grateful for mine.  And for you guys.

Today Kevin and I officially reached ten years of marriage.  Before our trip, before bad news and laundry and before Halloween festivities with the kids, I thought I would do some sort of video something for our ten years.  Or write something thoughtful.  Or shower before five p.m. or have a sitter lined up for us to go out to dinner together.  But as things stand, year ten finds us in a place that is perfect.  The kids and I shared a quiet day and eventually managed showers and non-pajamas before the five of us converged on a (thankfully) noisy Mexican joint for what turned out to be a celebration of the beginning of our family, as per my eight year old.

I was finally able to go through our vacation pictures today.  All thirty-eight hundred of them, which sort of works out since we drove thirty-three hundred miles this time (a whopping four hundred less than our last big road trip). That's about a shot a mile.  

Making our way through the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia

I was thinking on this trip that we are finally safe to consider ourselves travelers.  We have now been through thirty-seven states together, and even a couple months ago when travel could have been the easy martyr for the unexpected financial hit we took with the old house, I stuck my neck out and pledged to save money in any way except for sacrificing this understood priority of ours.  We live for the chance to be out on the open roads, and have already discussed which countries we move onto after we finish with the nifty fifty. (Beyond Ethiopia next year, that is.)  This is an education and life experience that can happen in no other way, and we love it.

Connecticut, Oh My God

While my family took road trips to many parts of the country as I was growing up, we never made it out to the East Coast.  This was my very first time heading in that direction, and Kevin had only been to certain parts as a kid. We were determined to see as much as humanly possible, and this journey did not disappoint.  

As a family of crazed history lovers, getting into Washington DC that first night held nothing short of an excitement comparable to our first Tour de Disney.  I couldn't believe that everything I had ever read in books or only seen in pictures was right there in front of me.

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial:  I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.  

Visiting the enormous Lincoln Memorial was every bit as awe-inspiring as I thought it would be, but just in the few minutes before we climbed the stairs to go inside, I turned and realized that we were standing in the exact spot Martin Luther King stood in when he gave his I Have a Dream speech in 1963, and right in the middle of all those tourists and my energetic children, I burst into tears. (I know, you guys, I am not even a crier.  Apparently this time in my life is a bit overwhelming on multiple unexpected levels.)

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.  I have a dream today.

Wow, right?

There was really no question, that our nation's entire capitol city was built with greatness in mind.  It was surreal.  We walked our kids' little feet off in the days we stayed there, and we could have easily spent the entire trip there, just exploring.  We will most certainly be back.

Also surreal, though in a completely different way from DC, was Philadelphia. Our initial reaction as we rolled into downtown Philly at lunchtime on a weekday, was one of Holy Shit-- it's History, Cheese and Onions!

Chicago has got to catch onto this cart thing.

In Philly we explored central historic places such as this, 

as well as places like this, which in some ways didn't even feel like 2010 America.  This was the 9th Street Italian Market, with tightly laid out streets lined with awnings, tables and storefronts selling fresh fruits and vegetables and meats of all sorts.  It was block after block of this, and just really, really neat.

Also indescribable was the diversity in Philadelphia. Kevin and I would point out to each other, Oh look at the Jewish market!  Next to the Mexican restaurant! Across from a crowd of white collar black, white, Asian and Indian folks with a few noisy construction workers thrown in, all waiting to cross the street for the nearest Cheese Steak Cart, obviously. And then down the very next block a crazy man with a knife who might kill you if the light doesn't change fast enough.  It was really cool, and also a bit chaotic.  Half of me wanted to live there while the other half wanted to floor it to the expressway before we even got a glimpse of the crack in the Liberty Bell.  I've never had quite that experience before.

Um, not that it stopped us from partaking in the famous local cuisine, you understand.

Geno's and Pat's are kiddie corner to each other, and fierce competitors.  And we were equal opportunity taste testers.  We had to be fair.  

For the record, we preferred Geno's for the straight-up sandwich, but liked Pat's for the variety of choices.  You can put practically anything on a steak sandwich.  Who knew?

Life List #76: Brooklyn Bridge

The really neat thing about driving across the eastern states is that so many of them are incredibly small, and if you doze off for even a few minutes (heh, not while manning the steering wheel, preferably) you might miss one.  My kids are used to driving across places like Georgia or Wyoming where you can navigate on the same unrelenting highway in one gigantic state for something like fifteen hours and you swear you've seen that same town or tumbleweed at least nine times.  Not on the East Coast, though.  Three pages of Mad Libs and you've gotten yourself from Washington DC all the way through Wilmington, DE, Baltimore, MD, Philadelphia, PA and straight into the heart of New York City. Now look who's not even stopped to pee!

Growing up a Chicago girl I have always wondered about New York.  Could it really be that different from Chicago, with the skyscrapers and the traffic and the crowds?  We drove across Staten Island on our way in, onto Long Island and then right into Manhattan at exactly five o'clock.  It happened this way completely by accident, of course, but the traffic was both completely expected and actually not that unusual for a big city.  Driving to all of the different major NYC sites I was surprised by two things: one, Manhattan went on forever. Forever!  I've always known Chicago to be the third largest city in the US, but Ohhhhh Riiiiiight...Our two point nine million people compared to New York's EIGHT million.  Well. That changes things.

The second thing that got me was the realization that my city?  Is not feeding me half as well as some of these East Coast cities.  New York has everything from Halal Carts on every corner offering every cuisine imaginable, to Mom and Pop diners to coffee shops and upscale deli's.  That, and boutiques.  Boutiques for art, boutiques for clothing, for furniture, for jewelery, for baby gear.  If you name it, someone is selling it in their own little original shop.  Hear this, Oh Walmarts.

There were a few biggies we planned visits for in New York City itself, as we walked and walked and walked.  The most important to our kids, of course, and the one reason they were so willing to tread miles on foot, was for their long awaited visit with what we knew to be The Big Toy Store.  From even before our trip we had promised that they could pick out a toy there, and we did crazy things like show them the giant piano from the movie Big.  We worked with all the cheesy pre-NYC knowledge we had.

When we were in Lexington, Kentucky, our children asked when we would be at the big toy store.  When we were at the White House, they needed to know how many days until the big toy store.  When we parked the car in New York wanted neither meals nor Central Park nor a thousand downpours of white granulated sugar rained down from the heavens.  They wanted the big toy store.

We arrived, finally, at the long anticipated toy store at seven twenty p.m..

The big toy store had closed at seven o'clock p.m..  

!!!

!!!...

!!1111!!!$*!#@!*&!!!!

Let this photographed moment be from now on understood as F-A-OH-SHIT.

On a Tuesday night!?  In New York City!?  

(Needle scratches across record.)

We didn't even know what to say to them.  It was a massive disappointment, and the only thing we could offer was a trip back the very next morning.  There was no way around the toys.  And yet the night still needed some salvaging.

Ice cream before dinner right in the heart of Times Square helped a little,

until we came upon the best kept secret in Times Square, apparently.  The Worlds Largest Toys R US lives there.  

Note my children:  KJ as the oldest, fully comprehends what a three story ferris wheel in the middle of a toy store means.  Jack, a four year old partly dazed by all the blinking lights-- my God the lights-- mostly gets it but remains mildly skeptical.  At first outdoor glance this appears to be the runner-up toy store of the evening and quite possibly his parents' way of squirming out of yet another day's parking fees in Manhattan. Two year old Marin's little mind is hardly on this planet, let alone in the middle of loud, flashy Times Square for toys.

Just.  Mind blowing.

I crossed off Life List #1 and my children each scored a souvenir and one hell of a ride with their dad on the ferris wheel.

More to come, lest I author here some sick sequel to War and Peace.  And as a side note, as I technically post this at 3:30am on October the 29th, it is no longer our tenth wedding anniversary but now my parents thirty-third wedding anniversary, so happy day for them. 

So much Autumn, So little time

I don't think we've wasted a moment yet this Fall, and the best is still ahead of us.  Every time I am out with my camera I take several hundred shots, and I am sure each time that I will rush home and create some sort of romantic, thematic blog entry out of our trip to the Grist Mill, to Notre Dame, to the Pumpkin Festival...  And then we arrive home and the kids need baths, baskets of laundry are stacked to the ceiling begging to be returned to drawers, homeschool assignments need to be checked and corrected and storybooks read, and then finally I crash on the couch so late at night and can hardly imagine why I would be tired.  It's a life well lived.

Almost there

Breakfast.

I was present for breakfast this morning, a late lunch this afternoon and dinner this evening.  That doesn't mean I didn't spend the whole morning working at the house while Kevin's mom stayed with the kids, and then return there with the kids after dinner for much of the night.  We were together for all three meals today, though.

This has been a really tough two weeks for our family.  Two weeks ago we were preparing for our Florida trip, thinking we'd come home to slap a coat of paint in a few rooms and have the place listed for sale in a few days' time.  Instead I have spent just about every waking moment of the last two weeks depending heavily on babysitters and moving down the never ending to-do list. I've stained all of the gashes and scratches in our hardwood floors, filled in all of the holes in the walls and painted every room, and watched helplessly as my dad spent his entire day off of work tearing up our bathroom floor, realizing that our renters weren't very good about using the shower curtain and turning the bathroom sub-floor into rotten, mushy garbage.  I put down a new bathroom floor this week, as well.  

Meanwhile my sister and Leslie feed our children dinner and bathe them and read them bedtime stories, and by day my mom does our laundry and my mother-in-law pulls the weeds that have gotten out of control at the house in which we actually live.  My wonderful girlfriends call to check on us.  We are so lucky for all of these people who are so willing to support us in any way they can, on a moment's notice.  I have been overwhelmed by the kindness we have received in the last two weeks.

Sadly, while Kevin and I can trudge through with another caffeinated beverage and the hope that the house will be done soon, our kids are not having an easy time of this upheaval of normalcy.  Marin becomes so nervous any time she thinks I may be leaving again, and cries to go with me everywhere.  Two nights ago I found her sobbing in her crib, still asleep, "I go with you, Mom. I go with you, I go with you."  Having just gone to bed thirty minutes prior, myself, I dragged her into bed with us where we chatted and sang and snuggled half the night away (and eventually sent daddy down to the couch so he could get a solid five minutes sleep before work!) and then I had to get up the next morning and leave her all over again. 

I can see evidence of the stress with KJ, and especially Jack, in different ways than with Marin.  Thankfully I was determined to begin homeschool on Monday and that has become our stronghold for time spent together, mid-day, almost every day this week. 

We are going to get through this.  We are almost finished, I keep promising the kids today.  I am going to cook meals again and read bedtime stories, and once and for all we will be finished with the house when it sells. 

There have been good moments, too- lots of them in these weeks.  Kevin and I have joined forces to knock out one task after the next, and speed through home improvement stores just before they close (with me in a wheelchair, even!) and then celebrate another day finished with ice cream late at night.  Lots and lots of ice cream.  (Bridesmaid dress wha??)  I have listened to all twelve hours of the Eat, Pray, Love audiobook in an otherwise silent house.  The kids have enjoyed the playground that is a mildly unfamiliar empty house where their voices echo and the hiding places are fresh.  We purchased stainless steel appliances for the house last week, and one of the two delivery men was-- from Africa!  We chatted for a bit.  Then I placed our old (still working) appliances on Freecycle and the couple that came to get them had five children.  We were almost giddy to talk with them about raising a lucky five, and woven quietly into the conversation was the thread that they were very poor.  They had recently lost their fridge as they could no longer afford the monthly rent-to-own payment, and they'd been doing all of their baking in a roaster.  All of their cakes, all of their frozen pizzas for a year- the father figured out how to bake in a roaster.  Never was I so thankful to be able to give something to someone.  In that moment I felt for sure this entire house debacle was worth it if only just to cross paths with this good family. 

We really are almost finished.  The stained basement walls have to be painted, the yard cleaned up a bit and the floors still need a good scrubbing.  Then a few staging pieces and we should be ready to list. 

After that?  I'm going to take the kids apple picking, and to the library.  And then we aren't leaving here again for a month.   

We are al. most. there.

Week in Fast Forward

Oh boy, Internet.  Where to begin?

Kevin and I arrived home from Florida late in the night on Monday, and by early Tuesday morning he and the kids and I were at the old house to survey the...uh...damage. 

Our renters moved out while we were gone over last weekend, and they said they would be back the following weekend to clean up.  Unfortunately for us as the homeowners, the quick split of our renters involves us taking over a second mortgage payment and all of the utilities without notice, so we needed to get in and get it ready for the real estate market as fast as possible.  We have a house to sell! 

We were amazed-- no, shocked-- when we walked into the house.  Many of our renters' miscellaneous items were left laying all over the floors, crowded in amongst more garbage I could have imagined would be there.  The back gate was broken, many of the storm windows were separated from their frames, there were new holes in the walls and scratches in the wood floors, and the toilet and sinks were brown and filthy.  In the first five minutes of our walk through, what we thought would be a quick mental list of pre-market fixes, was devastation.

The thing is, we love our renters.  We have from the beginning.  They are a very kind family and they have never missed a rent payment in more than two years.  They did not intentionally trash our house, as in walking through with a hammer and a can of spray paint, but we learned a lesson in the last week.  Our people, no matter how sweet, did not care for our home, are not invested in our home, in the same way that we are. 

I fell apart for the first couple hours, and then we regrouped.  Kevin shoveled the garbage and the leftover stuff out of the main parts of the house so that at least Marin would stop playing with d-con disks and toilet brushes.  We got to work immediately and within a single day we spent a few thousand dollars on faucets, flooring, appliances, spackle, stain, paint, caulk and cleaning products.  A house to sell, we declared repeatedly.

Throughout the week I spent every waking moment at the house, up until just an hour ago.  There is more to go.  We have accepted the kindnesses of our friends and family who have offered to care for our kids for us on and off while we worked, and when no babysitters were available the kids came with to the house, where they played in the landscaping dirt and with the plethora of paint sticks and pipe wrenches on hand. 

KJ asleep, hours past bedtime in the middle of the empty living room floor.  Lucky for Jackson and Marin, they have no respect for bedtime and were certainly crawling through the back drop ceiling or locating hundred-year-old secret passages abandoned long ago.

In the first three days I had patched all of the holes in the walls and painted the dining room, living room and entry hall, kitchen and kitchen cabinets and one bedroom.  Kevin had changed out the faucets, reassembled storm windows, cleaned gutters and removed eight thousand weeds from the landscaping, each night after work.  We were making progress.

On Friday morning I had neither a babysitter nor the gumption that is required when repeatedly working in an empty house all day with three young, bored children, so we took off for Ikea, where I loaded up on cheap curtains and cute staging items.  Then we went back to work on the house.

On Saturday morning I broke my foot.

Wait. 

Seriously.

This story is exactly the type of thing you read in the Old Testament, about Job who lost his house and his animals and his keys and got twelve kinds of diseases and still did not curse God.  At the tail end of everything that comes with supporting one's sister in the weeks before her wedding, in the week before I was to begin homeschool with two little boys and planning a bachelorette party and a rehearsal dinner, amidst an international adoption, our renters gave us a week's notice that they had to run and we were left with a mess and a mortgage.  Then both my sister and Leslie's cars up and died at the same time leaving four of us to share vehicles until one could be purchased...a purchase I helped negotiate just five hours before I boarded a red-eye to Florida for the funeral of my husband's beloved grandmother.  Then we worked our asses off from morning to midnight, and I injured my foot.  My right foot.  My gas pedal foot, might I add.

My mom had very generously committed herself to our house, our children and our laundry for the weekend so that Kevin and I could plow through as much as possible at the old house, hoping to list the house for sale by next week, and in my excitement for forty-eight hours of uninterrupted work time, I raced out to the grocery store early Saturday morning to provide my children and my mother with a well-stocked pantry and fridge.  And just in the way you would imagine someone who had spent ninety-seven tireless, caffeine-driven hours of home improvement stepping off of a front porch while unloading groceries and cursing at the asshole dog who had just run away for the millionth time, stepping off of a front porch, that is exactly how I stepped off the front porch.  I caught the edge of the sidewalk and rolled my foot down into our landscaping and anything but gracefully plastered my whole self to the very abrasive concrete sidewalk.  

Just so you know how a non-human, ridiculously robotically driven person responds to her bleeding foot and leg and pain shooting up from her foot all the way through her thigh, I stood up, realizing fully that things just went bad, and said in a very matter-of-fact manner, Holy Shit, I do not have time for this.  I was pissed.  I was so pissed.  I sat at my kitchen table with angry tears rolling down my cheeks, counting the rooms left to paint and so on, and I had my sister drop me off at the hospital so that at least Kevin would not miss out on precious babysitter-padded work hours at the house.  I hobbled my ass into the Emergency Room and had x-rays taken, where I was diagnosed by the E.R. doc with a bad sprain.  I have, however, broken a foot before-- this one! in fact!  I fractured my fifth metatarsal back in 2004 when Kevin left a hand weight on a basement stair (this is him, never living it down) and the shooting, awful pain is exactly like this, in my third metatarsal this time.  You know, in the part of my foot that resembles the epicenter of the overblown football. 

As I finished up at the hospital I sent my sister a quick text with something we always say in moments of slight challenge, We gonna fight. We gonna win.  Come hell or high water (please, no) we are going to finish this house as quickly as possible and list it before the summer selling season is officially over.  We are going to start school, and we are going to coast to this wedding.  We are going to carry this empty house for as long as need be this time, and we are going to sell it to the highest bidder.  It has been a long run, and the end is approaching.

Then I sent a text to my husband so that he would come get me, my throbbing foot and my awkward crutches, and bring me back to the house so I could resume work.  I could see my doctor on Monday about a more correct diagnosis and possibly a plastic shoe.

As a person with a husband could guess, Kevin was slightly frustrated with my plans to resume work with a broken foot.  I was slightly frustrated with his plans for me to sit home and stare blankly at the walls.  He was slightly frustrated with being married to the most stubborn person he's ever known and no, he doesn't know why the top of the crutches won't extend from four feet up to five foot seven, can't I just freaking use them like that?  Like a freaking Oompa Loompa?  In the middle of Walgreens where I insist I need to pick myself up a two pound bag of peanut m&m's to help wash down the pain pills, and a few guilt-riddled toy-presents for my children who have barely seen their mama in more than a week now?

We didn't get divorced, thankfully.

I continued on as I was, sort of, and even asked my darling spouse to snap this picture.  You know.  For my blawwwg.

Did I mention Saturday was our dating anniversary?  We've been together for thirteen years.  This is love, baby.

Of course today I stayed perched near the top of an eight foot ladder like a damn flamingo all day today.  He had to know my promises of sitting on the floor with the baseboards wouldn't last.  But the interior painting of the rooms is now finished, and I am no worse for the wear.  I am okay with this- all of this.  I have even been happy about some parts of it.  There have always been things I have loved about this house, and I have been able to enjoy them this week.  And whether or not the end of this house saga is actually near, I know for sure it is at least on its way.  We are finally making progress again, and though this process calls for many sacrifices, it is time.  It is time to say goodbye, happily and gratefully for all of the blessings that came from once having a little old house to live in, and then the trials and the growing that came from carrying a little old house for as long as we have.  At dinner on the very first night of this fiasco, Kevin talked to the kids and explained that this was going to take a lot of work and sometimes be no fun at all, but, he said, we were going to get through this together.  I am glad for the valuable lesson for my kids now, that pulling together and fighting harder is what you do when the going gets tough.  Throbbing damn foot and all.

+++

Oh, wait!  I forgot to share with you the name of my doctor in the emergency room on Saturday.

Dr. Painter. 

I kid you not. 

More with the placing one foot in front of the other

I initially started this entry out by going through, step by step with you, all of the Suck that has suddenly shown up this week.  I kept thinking as I wrote the paragraphs that I hate entries like this-- where I methodically lay out every difficulty that is heaping itself atop us at the moment.  I really hate entries like that, I realized more and more, and I had to decide not to write it even though some sad and frustrated part of myself wanted to hurl it all out into the abyss of the world wide web, like one might imagine spinning around and around and finally chucking a heavy, rounded bag of desperately dirty laundry out into space, just so that someone could agree with me that, yes, that sucks.

You know, in case you regularly hurl heavy laundry bags out into space as for an olympic event, or something.

Each challenge is its own, though, and if I can keep them separate from each other and not piled together in one giant mound of Things That Suck, we can get through each one by just putting one foot in front of the other, and maybe even find a reason to smile in between deep breaths. 

I deleted all of those paragraphs and leave you with this part, which is where we are right at this very moment:   

Yesterday morning at 6am we received a phone call from Florida.  Kevin's granny passed away.

We have known for eight months now that she has been very sick with cancer.  She went from mowing her lawn at eighty-four years old, and caring for a neighbor friend and scrubbing floors and stripping beds, to being very sick quite suddenly.  I have never known a woman with such energy and determination at her age, and I hope to be her one day.  She was so thrown off about the whole idea of the cancer and what would happen.  I could see myself that way, too.  She went back and forth with wondering how it would all play out, knowing she was terminal, to trying to find peace with God, who she told me again and again, knew best.

I am so glad we went down to visit her last December, when we could all spend time together and she was well enough to enjoy a visit.  She has always been so good to us and we have such wonderful memories of her, and we will really, really miss her.

This is a picture of us with Granny, seven years ago on one of our visits down to her house in Florida, as evidenced by baby KJ in Kevin's arms and all the extra weight we carried.  It was on that visit that Gran walked us down her quiet, palm tree-lined street full of retirees enjoying the afternoon on porches and patios to her Aunt Evelyn's house where we sat and chatted for a few hours, and where for the first time Kevin and I imagined our lives a little differently.  "Once you get that Florida sand in your shoes," Aunt Evelyn explained with her charming southern twang, "you can never get it out."

She was right, to an extent, because while we didn't exactly pack a U-haul the following week and move our lives across the country, we did begin to think outside of that little box we had spent so much of our time in, and that was good for us.  A sure foreshadowing of things to come. 

In a couple days Kevin and I will leave our children and our home to the capable hands of various combinations of relatives, and we will fly down to Florida to say one last goodbye for now to his Granny and all that she embodied while she was with us.

What's that wisdom of Dr Seuss?  Don't cry because it's over.  Smile because it happened. 

We were so blessed to call her ours.

The hits keep coming

And my family room is finished.  Still missing most of its child created homeschool happiness until August, but boasting new coats of paint just the same (for this year, anyway). 

It seems that Januaries and Junes bring me great bursts of energy that I must exhaust, and much of the time I seem to take it out on the walls of our home.

These babies hadn't been painted in nearly three years, which is some sort of record for me, and the knicks and spots and unscrubbable fingerprint stains had been driving me batty for many moons.

My original plan was to paint the kitchen and the family room while the boys were at summer camp and little sissy napped, but those moments of quiet opportunity are so few and far between that it might have taken three lifetimes to finish a project of such magnitude.  Most thankfully I am married to a man who understands my energetic outbursts.  He takes the children away for a whole Saturday and allows me to go to work. 

I spent the day trimming and rolling the colors of the shore onto my walls, and listening to the many inspiring words of Pema Chodron posted all over YouTube.  I painted my family room and parts of the kitchen, and steam cleaned carpets on all three floors while plowing through seven loads of laundry all at the same time, late into the night.  I know there will come a day that I don't have the energy that I do now, so a note to my future self: It is now time to relax, at eighty-four.

Note to Mama: Your male counterpart, my father, knows not how to put pretties in my hair.  Please, before you paint or rest, do hop this gate and rectify the situation.  For I cannot see.

I had such great hopes for what the summer would bring, in terms of beautiful sunsets (win) and projects (win!) and rest (ohhh) and the many outings we could enjoy as a family (another win).  And though I've kept myself so unstoppably in motion, I have been struggling within myself.  Right through the tasks, right through the museum days and beach days and errand days- quietly struggling and drinking up the increasingly rare quiet times like never before.  It is so odd.

Thankfully there are slow watermelon evenings on the back patio, and quiet summer sunsets.  There are girlfriends with arms outstretched and moments of realized perfection beside weeping willow trees.  And warm sunshine. 

 

And long, quiet days of paint.

Backyard Chatter

The neighbor kids next door to us got a trampoline for their back yard this year.  It sounds like so much fun- the bouncing, squealing, squealing and bouncing.  They set it up right beside our shared six foot privacy fence, so we hear all of the fun but see only little heads bobbing up and down over the fence. 

So Kevin and the kids and I are out in the back yard recently, and we hear the bouncing begin.  There are four or five little girls and a boy or two jumping, giggling together and switching back and forth between speaking English and Spanish.     

We hear one girl announce excitedly in broken English that she has a game to play.

We're sort of half processing this from our side of the fence, as we're busy hanging laundry and pulling weeds in our back yard.  But hearing it nonetheless. 

So her game, she says, is for everyone to jump as Hiiiiiiigh as they can, and then jump off the trampoline, onto the ground!

Yikes, I think.  Dangerous.

And then, she continues, once you land on the ground--- the person who cries?  Goes to hell.

I laughed so hard I almost peed mah pants.