Shopping With A Monkey On Your Back

Little Old Lady (observing the double-seater cart and the baby in the carrier strapped to my back): Well, aren't they precious!  Tell me something.  Would your husband go shopping with three little babies?

Me (thinking, No, and smiling): Well, he'd try.  He'd probably have to call me.

Miss Boo: And Mama lost her phone.

Good Morning, Good Morning

It ISN'T great to stay up late, in case you have Debbie Reynolds tap-dancing through your skull, now.  At least, the joy of the lateness wears off when you have to get up early and deal with everyone else's bathroom issues.

The other day it occurred to me that eventually I will again be responsible for no one's bathroom issues but my own.  The concept seemed so bizarre and unattainable that I suddenly understood why so many of the little old ladies I used to see as a nurse felt the need to inform me about their husbands's bathroom issues: habit is strong.

But let's be a little more encouraging than just whining, one more time, about "Ooooooopoooooo", as Buddy texted the Husband via my phone the other day, shall we?  We shall.

I was encouraged yesterday when I got out the Bible story book and the only thing all three kids wanted to do was sit with me and read.  Granted, Buddy wanted to repeat stories over and over again and we jumped back and forth between the 23rd Psalm, the defeat of Goliath, and the story of Joseph and his brothers, but hey, a lot of adults don't read the Bible chronologically either.

I should put in another plug here for the One Year Bible (New Living Translation).  The modern language has a way of hammering home a point that you might not always pick up under more traditional phrasing.  I'm in the major prophets at the moment, and Isaiah is always saying "The passionate commitment of the Lord of Heaven's Armies will accomplish this."  I think we occasionally think of God's will as being kind of an unemotional, almost negative thing--like a computer telling you facts without any feeling behind it.

But "the passionate commitment of the Lord of Heaven's Armies?"  God has passions?  Oh yes, He does.  Where do you think we get ours, if not from being made in His image?  The difference, of course, is that God's emotions are always appropriate and He is in no way enslaved to them like we can be to ours.  Our emotions are often inappropriate--set off by stuff that shouldn't set them off.  However, the overwhelming talk of God's emotions in the prophets (and elsewhere in Scripture) tells me that we don't need to be afraid to feel our emotions, and that there's a purpose for them.

We tend to be suspicious of too much emotion, afraid it will make us irrational or foolish.  But emotions and reason don't have to be mutually exclusive.  Just as you can train your reason, you can train your emotions to be appropriate.  You can decide in advance, believe it or not, that you are not going to get upset by something. or that you're going to be tenderhearted toward someone.  Try it.

I'm trying it today, deciding not to get upset by the inevitable spills, scribbles, shouts, and squabbles around my house.  I probably won't be entirely successful--my emotions are still getting trained.  But think of it like playing the violin.  I'll never get them to make great music, serving other people AND me, if I don't practice.

I hope, anyway.  I'm telling you about it to keep myself accountable.

Cheers,

Breanna

Wonsday

So the kids have a Veggie Tales DVD that's a collection of all the Silly Songs.  This is great for Buddy,because he's got a musical ear and likes to sing more than almost anything.  (With his mouth shut, of course.)

Anyway, I hadn't heard this particular Silly Song before, and I liked it a lot. I think they nail the angles and camera work in real boy band videos.

Enjoy, if your Wednesday is more like a Monday, too.

Cheers,

Breanna

Grandparent Edition! (Well, and Football)

The NFL started last week.  We were excited.

(Yes, it lamely took me almost a week to get these photos posted.)

She had to have a pink version of her Daddy's Jerome Bettis jersey.  Because otherwise all she cares about during football games is identifying the guys who wear #10.

See?  Like father, like daughter.

Not that we're fans or anything.

This is being upset that football isn't also a cartoon called Word Girl.  She crams herself in between the bookcase and the wall.  It's a great pouty-hiding-place.  Bud gets in there a lot too.

Also lamely I had a hard time actually capturing the grandparents on film.  Here is Miss Boo "folding" laundry (and I think Grammy's hand).

Here is Buddy trying to pay attention to his training (while Grammy's hand is folding laundry in the foreground and Baba's feet are off to one side)

He had this little orange plastic frog from Great-Grandma that has been very popular.

Here is Littleman, proving he can stand up while only holding on with one hand.

And posing for the camera...

And crawling away from his favorite window...

We got a typewriter from Grammy, and we were so thrilled to have a "computer".

Eventually Mama wised up and took out the "paper"--the typewriter ribbon.

Thank goodness, or it could have gotten pretty messy.  As it is, she's rapidly learning to type.

Back to the favorite window, with the babysitter.

"Oh Graps?  Graps?  Whatcha doin, Graps?"

"Me?  Oh, I'm just watching the bushes sway and the cars go by."

We had a great time with the grandparents, and sent them off to Iowa this morning (after which they will return to the Rockies).  And now... back to real life, and more writing, and perhaps more posting.

Now if you'll excuse me, Buddy really really really thinks he needs Coke for breakfast, and I have to go dissuade him.  (I typed "oblige him" the first time accidentally.  Is that disturbing?)

Cheers,

Breanna

How to Cook Dinner

When you've got children hanging off your legs, I mean.  It's simple--distract them.  Usually we use Daddy.  

He's working a weird shift, however.

Tonight we went with the more expensive option of buying new sleeping bags.

You probably don't want to do this every night--the sleeping bags would pile up--and I am starting to wonder if I'll have to lay these on their beds to get them to go to bed tonight, but hey.

If it works, it works.

Cheers,

Breanna

P.S. We bought the new sleeping bags in honor of Grammy & Baba coming to visit, and the attendant bed-shuffling.  Miss Boo is feeling sorry that Grammy & Baba (and Grandma Naomi and Grandpa Mike) don't get to sleep in princess sleeping bags on the floor.  They have to use boring old beds.  Sorry.

Book Review - Loving the Little Years

Remember that scene in "On Golden Pond" where Norman grumpily thumps a book at the kid and mutters, "This is Treasure Island.  It's a good book.  Read it!"

That's how I do book reviews, I'm afraid.

It probably won't surprise you that I've read a lot of nonfiction books on how to be a better mother/wife/housekeeper.  I used to plow through stacks from the library, back when I could go to the library with any kind of ease, and cherry-pick a good idea from a mountain of bad ones.  Mom/Wife/Houswife books are like Pez.  You can pop them off like three or four in a day, and mostly they're all the same.

I've done your "What to Expect" thing (bad idea, that).  I've done your Dr. Sears thing (better, if you can look past the brightly naive tone).  I've read The Stay-At-Home Mom's Survival Guide (some good ideas, but sort of grim in outlook), and Confessions of an Organized Homemaker (which is worth reading more than once, and really does work) and Home Comforts (which ought to be treated like a textbook or dictionary, but is useful for figuring out how to clean special or strange things).  Most of these books--not Confessions--are different from each other but the same in one way: they make you feel more or less inadequate.

They often do this while they are trying to help you and while they are assuring you that you are not meant to feel inadequate from their advice.  Then they turn around and say something like, "all moms need to have at least two hours of alone time per week.  Negotiate with your spouse or find a babysitter and leave the house for two hours, to get a haircut, go to a doctor's appointment, or just browse bookstores.  If you don't get this, you will not be in any mental state to care for children."

This is an example of advice that sounds eminently reasonable, makes a mom of littles pant with desire (ALONE time?!?!? sign me up!), and that is, for me, utterly unattainable.

No, it isn't that the Husband refuses to watch the kids.  It's that one of them breastfeeds, one of them is in a clingy phase where he gets sad and sobs if I go to the bathroom without him, and the third wants to come with me because she's worried I'll select the wrong haircut if she's not there to give advice.  Going away for two hours isn't worth the four hours of recovery I have to oversee when I get home.  Which leaves me where?  You guessed it.  "Not in any mental state to care for children."

(Well, we all knew that.)

Not so Loving the Little Years -- this is written by a woman who, in her own words, "didn't have children so long ago that I only remember the special parts".  It's a series of meditations or devotionals that are designed to challenge and encourage the mom who is at home, all day, with little, grubby, grabby, wonderful, passionate, fussy, destructive, creative, and energetic people.  The author has five kids and they were ages five and under when the book was written.  It's evident by the way she intersperses her devotional with things like "because you're pretty sure you hear someone playing with the microwave." (Amen, sister, preach it!)

I've read four or five of her bite-sized chapters so far.  They are all encouraging and contain a nugget that I can use during my day.  For instance, talking about passionate emotions (and girls), Jankovic compares emotions to horses.  Having the emotions isn't wrong, and we don't want to cripple our children's horses, but we want to teach them how to ride--what to do with those emotions so they don't become destructive.

Since I've got a passionate one (Miss Boo), the perspective was great.  We've been working on the concept "You are the boss of your feelings--just because you are mad doesn't mean you have to have a fit."  So I liked Jankovic's idea to say before a situation that might be explosive, "We're going to go do  ____ and you might feel like you want to fuss.  What are we going to do instead?"  Give your kids (and yourself) tools for dealing with their emotions.  Simple, but it hadn't always occurred to me.

I link to the Kindle edition above because it's only $6.00, and it's worth getting.  If you want to give a mom with littles a gift that will encourage her, I can't think of anything better than this.  (Well, maybe this bundled with a candle and bath salts, but I haven't been able to light the candle I bought three weeks ago yet and I haven't had a soak in....huh, I don't really remember.  So maybe just this.)

Anyway.  Good book.  Read it.

Cheers,

Breanna

Welcome Autumn

With a cough!  Because it's how we roll at the change of seasons at my house.

We do things like refuse to lay on a bed or the couch, because (I suspect) Mama's chair smells like Mama.

We play wild mixing games with yogurt, sprite, OJ, and Pediasure.  (Yeeccccch.  Must get this from Uncle Markie.)

"What?  I like it."

Notice a general liquid and liquid-type substance theme going on here?  Yeah.  Miss Boo won't swallow today.  Anything.  Remind you of anyone?

When we get sick in this house we forget to feed the baby, apparently.  He has to eat sunglasses and scrounge for old sippy cups left by his elders.

She doesn't look up to much scrounging, does she?  She kept me and herself up often enough last night that I think we got about three hours of sleep, and not all in a row.

She only napped about an hour today (me too).  Sigh.

That's why the couch is a "Couch Bed" right now.

And this is half of the list I sent to the store with the Husband.

Pray for us, huh?

Cheers,

Breanna

I'm Not Arguing That With You

Ever have a day like this?



Me too.

Cheers,

Breanna

Careful Building

I pointed and said to the Husband, "did you teach her this?"

"No" he answered.  "I didn't teach her.  I built them a helicopter the other day but she figured this out on her own."

Carefully putting the pieces together.

"Look Mama.  See, Daddy?  It's train tracks.  Like a Dinosaur Train."

"See?"

I do, honestly, see these moments most of the time.  It's been a hellacious few weeks, between the Husband's work schedule, the record heat, and me trying to write.

I'd just skip the writing but that makes me jittery and distracted--I mean more than usual--and nobody likes it when I do that.  So I try to write in and around the kiddos.  Taking care of them and wiping up poop and feeding them and teaching them not to climb the toilet or each other.  There's not much "around" left, really.

And then at the end of the day, you look around and go, "what did we do all day? besides pick legos up seven separate times?"

The answer, apparently, is that they were learning all day long.  Which I'm sure grateful to have photographic evidence of, because this motherhood gig is a toughie.  Like, I sort of think most of the time I should be better at it.  But all I can do is keep doing it, and keep seeing the good moments.  God gave me the job, and He'll enable me to get it right.

Cheers,

Breanna