Posts tagged motherhood

A Quiver full of Blessings

March 13, 2012 · Filed under Frogs and Snails and Puppy-dog Tails, Things that Matter · Tagged , , , ,

When I consider all the evenings Oliver and I have fallen into bed, utterly exhausted by our three boys and their antics, yesterday seems even more surreal. While on most evenings I find myself praying, “God just give us the strength for this next half hour of showers and tooth brushing,” yesterday I found myself thanking God for the three amazing gifts that never cease to surprise us.

After a lovely day of gardening and playing outside, we had just finished supper when a landscaper friend came by the house to give us some advice on our outdoor plans. We left the boys to play inside so that we could both be part of the consultation. Every now and then I would check on the boys, just to make sure that there wasn’t any trouble. After all, in my experience, war will break out between those three within about 2 minutes of being left to their own devices. Though I didn’t actually see them, their quiet voices assured me that there was no reason to worry. “They’re probably just looking at books,” I thought. Still, strange…

As we were wrapping up the consult with the landscaper on the front porch, we spied the kids inside, jumping around in the living room, obviously trying to get our attention. Seeing that they were all happy and smiling, I simply smiled, nodded, and returned my attention to our friend. All of a sudden it dawned on me that Teddy was wearing PJs. Come to think of it, so was Sammy. Upon closer inspection, even Caleb was in PJs, which surprised us, since Caleb does not dress himself yet. “Too bad they don’t know it’s shower day,” I commented to the two Dads standing on the porch. “They’ll just have to take everything off again.”

At that point I noticed, however, that the boys’ hair looked wet. “Teddy,” I asked our 7-year-old through the window glass, “Did you shower?”

“Yup!” he exclaimed, obviously tickled pink that I was slowly putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

“Did you shower everyone?”

“Yup!” he said again, a giant smile on his face. “We even brushed our teeth!”

I couldn’t resist re-introducing our trophy children to our family friend, who was as shocked as Oli and I were.

As we were preparing to begin the story time ritual a little while later, Caleb suddenly entered the room saying, “I yat a poop!” Since Caleb still prefers the diaper to the potty for this particular bodily function, I assumed he was stating a fact that was in the past tense. I quickly ushered him into the bathroom, where it turned out that his pants were clean and he was eager to sit on his little red pot.

From his vantage point watching the exciting drama unfold in the doorway, Teddy was quick to tell me that he had already put Caleb on the potty before his shower. (Trust me folks, this kind of thing happens all the time when you have trophy children.) Apparently Caleb was having a great potty-day, because his subsequent potty-success sealed the deal on an incredible day.

We read stories snuggled on the couch in front of a warm fire, and finished off the time with some acappella singing. When we got to Peter Lutkin’s The Lord Bless You and Keep You – which I have been singing to all three at bedtime since they were nursing babes – I decided to take the two older boys to sing in Caleb’s room, who was still awake in his crib. As we stood in the darkness by his crib singing the familiar strains of this beautiful hymn of blessing, Caleb joined his little voice to our dissonant chorus. Although we don’t yet have harmonizing voices, that day we had harmony in the home. It was there in the darkness that I mentally bottled the moment; a small preserve for the next time they’re at each other’s throats and I’m losing my mind. For all the trouble they are, children are indeed a blessing.

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C’est L’amour – the Fall-Out of Valentines Day

February 15, 2012 · Filed under Frogs and Snails and Puppy-dog Tails, In My Humble Opinion · Tagged , , ,

Buster Brown Valentine postcard by Richard Fel...

Image via Wikipedia

The only thing more frustrating than wasting err… spending precious time on February 13 making your child’s Valentines for his classmates, is finding every single Valentine still in his backpack when he comes home from school on February 14.

I didn’t realize how much pent-up frustration I still held from the previous night’s mad dash to finish something I do not believe in to begin with, but let’s just say Valentines Day at our house became a little less sweet beginning at 3:30 in the afternoon when everyone arrived home. “Sammy, what’s this?!?!?” I asked, both surprised and annoyed.

“Oh, I forgot.” He answered.

Nice try, my boy. There is no way he could have forgotten when I spent the night before urging him on toward the goal of at least writing his name on all of the cards, by painting a mental picture of how he would get to be the mailman the next day and distribute all his little letters in the kids’ mailboxes.

On the morning of February 14 I led him to his backpack, showed him the bag full of Valentines, and again enthused about how today was going to be a great day where he would get to hand out all of his Valentines just like the other kids.

You may ask why all this enthusiasm is necessary. I’ve already learned that our Sammy’s middle name is Apathy when it comes to things like this. The canned goods I sent in all came back home in his backpack. “I forgot.” His library book collected about 25,000,000 Air Miles riding back and forth in his backpack before he finally returned it. And now, we have over 60 Valentines in the house: Teddy’s received Valentines, Sammy’s received Valentines, and Sammy’s undistributed ones. I know you’re all laughing at the poetic justice of it all.

I should have known something was amiss when he was unwilling to go into school yesterday. He quietly confided in me that he didn’t want to hand out his Valentines. A shy boy, he probably feared having to go out on a limb and personally wish everyone a happy Valentines Day along with his little offering. I explained that he only needed to put them in the kids’ mailboxes when everyone else was doing the same thing.

Knowing that he is sometimes blissfully unaware of what’s going on around him because he has his head stuck in a fantasy world involving paper fish and possibly fire-breathing dragons, I figured he probably doesn’t really get what’s supposed to happen with those Valentines. So we went in together and I talked to his teacher, explaining that he was nervous for some reason and might need a bit of help handing out his Valentines. His teacher, an exuberant woman who does not have an introverted bone in her body, simply exclaimed, “Oh, he’ll be fine. It’s you who looks nervous.” Little did she know that I had a vested interest in those blasted things, am fully aware of my son’s track record in these types of things, and had just picked up our two-year-old off the ground after he had gone down a wet slide wearing only cotton pants.

My guess is, that while all the other children were happily putting their mothers’ carefully prepared Valentines into all their friends’ mailboxes, our son was either eating a cupcake (blissfully unaware) or playing with the dinosaurs in a corner (also blissfully unaware).

Maybe we should have just used the undistributed Valentines as fire-starters this morning and saved ourselves the hassle. Although, living with the guilt of having transgressed the 11th commandment would be too much for me to bear.

 

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C’est L’amour

February 13, 2012 · Filed under Frogs and Snails and Puppy-dog Tails, In My Humble Opinion · Tagged , , ,

I just finished the single-most futile yet somehow obligatory task in all of motherhood: my children’s Valentines cards. Combined, we completed over 40 this year. And yes, the kids did help. A little.

This afternoon (Feb. 13) at 5:00pm I found myself browsing through Shoppers Drug Marts’ assorted Valentine offerings along with all the Dads who had left the task to the last minute. The funny part is that I am not a Dad, but a Mom who is supposed to love Valentines Day and all it stands for. I’m supposed to be the torchbearer of all things sappy and pink in a household where my gender is outnumbered 4:1, but I just cannot do it. In my mind, Valentines Day and this ridiculous tradition of handing out a Valentine to every child in the class could be done away with, beginning immediately.

Being the saintly mother that I am, however, there I was standing in the drug store trying to decide on whether to throw my money away on Dinosaur Valentines or (official) NHL Valentines. The Dad next to me was on his cell phone with his 6-year-old: “How about Hello Kitty? No? Tinkerbell?… Ummmm, pink, it looks like… The Tinkerbell ones are Pop-Ups. No? So Hello Kitty then? Ok, I’ll keep looking.”

I wasn’t about to let my kids make the choice between dumb and dumber, and so I went with the non-licensed character Picture Search Valentines for Teddy, who would love that type of thing, and the Dolphin Pop-Up Valentines for Sammy, who would also love that type of thing. Had I realized that the pop-ups aren’t actually built-in, I would have dropped that box like a hot potato.

While Teddy went about preparing his Valentines like a seasoned pro in a chicken processing plant, Sammy needed more guidance (this being his first Valentines Day, after all). He was so taken with those dolphins that all he wanted to do was play with them. I repeatedly reminded him that his only task was to sign his name, which he did to the best of his ability. My tasks in preparing those Valentines included:

  •  punching the 20 dolphins out of the cardboard
  • matching the correct dolphin to the correct card background (which took some figuring out, seeing as there were 8 different card designs and 8 different dolphin types – Yay!)
  • bending the little tabs to fit into the little slots of the cards
  • carefully finagling them through the little slots
  • ensuring that each dolphin would actually pop up
  • securing the card tops into the little tabs to keep it closed
  • addressing it to the lucky classmate who would receive this token of Sam’s affections.

The hilarious thing is that Sammy has no interest in actually giving Valentines to girls. Just this morning he was telling me that girls only gave to girls and boys only gave to boys.

If only this were so, my Boy.

The truth is that there is this unspoken 11th commandment that says “thou shalt prepare a Valentine for each child in the class of thy progeny with a view to each child’s fragile self-esteem and the other parents’ esteem of thee. Shouldst thou disregard this immovable law, thou and thy child shalt be smitten with the knowledge that thou wast the only family to not participate in this most sacred Elementary sacrament.”

So every year I put it off until the very last minute, finally haul my reticent rear-end to Shoppers Drug Mart on February 13, and spend the evening helping my children complete a task that they really cannot be expected to do by themselves at the age of 4.

I asked one last-minute Dad whose children are in grades 5 and 2 whether there was any end in sight to this madness. He didn’t offer me much hope, saying that the tradition was still alive and well in his daughters’ grade 5 class. I’ve done the math, people. If this blight lasts until grade 6, I will have spent 12 years buying and preparing Valentines that will only end up in the recycling the next day (at least if the other homes are anything like ours). For 7 of those years I will be responsible for more than 60 Valentines.

I think it’s time to start a revolution.

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Parenting 101

January 6, 2012 · Filed under Things that Matter · Tagged , , ,

I’ve decided that my New Years resolution this year is to figure out my kid. I’m a little slow on the draw, I know, seeing as he’s seven years old, but this boy really should have come with an instruction manual.

When Teddy was first born I was a freshly minted PSYC 1F90 graduate. That’s right, I had a full 8 months of introductory psychology under my belt folks, and I knew how to raise a child. I come from a long line of people who see the world in black and white, and so I foresaw no problems in the child-rearing department. According to my upbringing, you brought a child in line early and he stayed there until he moved out. According to my psychology textbook, you rewarded a child for good behaviour and discouraged bad behaviour by frowning, and you could save yourself the hassle of punishment altogether. I was confident that by combining these two silver bullets I would be large and in charge of the most well-behaved, well-adjusted children on the block.

Since then we’ve moved to a new block, so maybe that’s the problem. Whatever it is, I am as large and in charge of my well-adjusted children as Italy’s Prime Ministers have been of their feisty fellow parliamentarians. What I didn’t take into account when we welcomed the child that would make us the perfect parents, was that God has a never-ending arsenal of tricks up his sleeve in order to keep us dependent on Him for things, including parenting wisdom.

I should make it clear that there are many things parents can do to influence their children’s behaviour. I am a firm believer that consistent expectations and follow-through are extremely effective when raising a well-behaved child. My struggles are not with any of those things. It’s those behaviours that I cannot control with discipline that have had me on my knees on a daily basis. Here are a few examples:

  • A 3-year-old who will not say “I’m sorry” or “Thank You” even though you have pulled out every available weapon in your parenting arsenal, including taking away the Christmas present he won’t say thank you for. This particular battle lasted over 24 hours.
  • That same 3-year-old who consistently refuses to pose for family pictures for no apparent reason, even under threat. This battle has lasted for years.
  • A 4-year-old who will not allow the dentist to look into his mouth, no matter what fun tactics the dental assistant employs.
  • That same 4-year-old who shuns the singing of “Happy Birthday” as though it violates some non-negotiables of his personal credo.
  • A 5-year-old with persistent, relentless fears of objects that should not induce fears: exercise equipment in the corner, a shower head, a lamp. Trust me, we tried all the advice, including prayer!
  • A 6-year-old who cannot focus on a simple task like brushing his teeth without being reminded at least 4 times and possibly even punished for good measure.
  • A 7-year-old who spends his days whipping his brothers into an active frenzy by consistently leading them in activities like tag, playing ball, jumping, tackling, drumming, tickling, dancing, and anything else that makes noise or creates havoc.

 There was a time when I would have had solutions to these problems, but that was before I met our precious first-born. I also would not have believed that a child as young as age 2 could be a leader of men, or that a 4-year-old could spend a full 20-minute car ride counting to 1,000. I would have freaked out had you told me that my 5-year-old would remove the bread that he thought was done baking out of the oven, loaf by loaf, so that “Mommy and Daddy wouldn’t have to do it.” I would have been delighted to hear that my 6-year-old would take the initiative to clear out the dishwasher and start breakfast, and that he would answer the phone more competently than most 14-year-olds. I would have looked forward to a tidy basement, bedrooms (all of them), bathroom, and living room, courtesy of a sudden bright idea that told my 7-year-old to motivate his brothers to “surprise Mommy” with this special treat. I would have been extremely proud to hear of his helpfulness in the classroom, or that he sticks up for other kids when they are being bullied on the playground. And when someone tells me that my son is “gifted” and may deal with certain “overexcitables” and “sensory processing” issues (is hyper-sensitive to different stimuli, leading to heightened emotional responses and distractibility), I would be initially surprised, but not really.

If nothing else, our daily parenting struggles with a child who just does not fit the mould have made me far more gracious about other people’s struggles with their kids. I realize that not every problem goes away as a result of positive reinforcement or even consistent discipline. I see parents with kids who have chosen the wrong path, and instead of attempting to lay blame for the things they neglected or were guilty of, I allow for the fact that I do not know their child and am in no position to judge. God has made our little people extremely complex, and who am I to try to simplify things?

On second thought, maybe I should tweak my resolution. Maybe figuring out my kid is an exercise in futility. Maybe a dose of patience and a lot more prayer will be the silver bullets that make 2012 a better parenting year than the previous seven!

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For the Love of Brothers

January 10, 2011 · Filed under Frogs and Snails and Puppy-dog Tails · Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

I have recently asked myself the question, “what must have gone through Eve’s mind when she brought Abel home from the…wherever babies were born at the dawn of time?” As the first sibling in the history of the world, it was anyone’s guess as to how this would play out. Eve probably knelt down, took little Cain in her arms, and said with great feeling, “look honey, it’s a baby brother for you! He’ll be your best friend and you’ll play together all the time and maybe, when you’re older, Daddy will build you bunk beds!”

Not having grown up with any siblings (not having “grown up” at all, I suppose) Adam and Eve must have been left scratching their heads more than once about why on earth their two boys just couldn’t get along. When exactly did it dawn on them that there was a problem between their boys? Was it the first time Cain grabbed baby Abel and dragged him around the house by his head? Perhaps it was when Abel was 3 ½ and Cain was 6, and Abel would argue every single point Cain made, insisting that the blue sky was actually red, and a helium balloon floats down, not up. At least there were no relatives who gave the boys non-identical gifts, otherwise Cain and Abel would have been fighting about who got to play with which jeep too.

Some of my readers will think all this conjecture a stretch, no doubt, but look at how that relationship ended. Don’t tell me those boys didn’t have a history before Cain finally did in his younger brother.

After two weeks of Christmas holidays, Oli and I found ourselves desperately wishing for a four-bedroom house where we could sequester the boys at regular intervals.  Our new parenting motto is “divide and conquer.” I highly recommend this motto to anyone who feels like they’re kept busy just trying to put out fires as they erupt between their children. (It’s also very useful when you’re trying to get two of your children to complete a simple task like putting on their pj’s while you’re putting the baby to sleep. The division will decrease the temptation for the children to run around naked in their bedroom, waving their pajamas like a cowboy lassoing a heffer, and shouting and laughing loudly about jokes involving poo, pee, and farts.) Alas, we remain in our three-bedroom home, which brings with it some unique problems beginning at 7:00am and usually ending 13 hours later.

We have been blessed with a bossy and pious 6-year-old parent and a 3 ½ year-old dissenter with the emotional constitution of a stick of butter. Here is the typical 6:45am interchange for these two who, for better or worse, share a bedroom: One of the boys wakes up and cannot stand being awake alone, so he wakes up the other boy. Since it’s still dark and neither one likes the dark (besides, it’s lights-out until 7:00am) they are completely co-dependant until the lights are on. If Teddy has to go pee and heads out the door too quickly, Sammy panics and begins to cry as he quickly runs after him to the bathroom.

Once in the bathroom they begin to discuss, which is dangerous when one of the boys feels compelled to argue every point that his brother makes, and the other has the patience quotient of a Tazmanian Devil. Teddy, who usually begins any conversation, will make a statement like, “Sammy, when we’re done peeing we have to go back into our beds until the clock says 7:00.” At age 3 ½ (at least I attribute this to his age… it’s my only hope) Sammy will inevitably say, “No we don’t,” in that sing-song way that annoys Teddy more than anything else in the world. Instantly furious, Teddy reiterates the validity of his statement by angrily pointing out that, “yes we do, because Mom said so!” Using the broken-record tactic that drives even the most expert debater to the brink of madness, Sam simply re-uses his initial response: “No she didn’t” (imagine the sing-song voice here). In Teddy’s world it’s two strikes and you’re out, and so he comes out swinging at his annoying younger brother, who immediately bursts into heart-wrenching sobs and comes running out of the bathroom blubbering about how Teddy’s angry and he hit him. Go figure. Repeat this interchange with slight variations throughout the day and take away separate rooms, and you might see why I desire a four-bedroom house.

18 months ago we were also entrusted with a highly intelligent, mischievous little boy whose idea of a good time is incessantly bothering his older brother Sam with things like repeatedly touching his arm while we’re driving (yes, that is a grievous sin), or pressing in really closely next to him to get a look at the book Sam’s looking at. When Sam – who, deep down, is really a peaceful little boy – takes his book and moves away, Caleb will wait for only a second or two before following him to press against his side once again. (It doesn’t help the situation that Caleb is really near-sighted and needs to see things up close.) When Sam says, “No Caleb!” our pre-verbal baby can often be heard responding with “ehh!” which Sam correctly interprets as a “yes,” which results in those two phrases being volleyed back and forth between the two.  As Sammy’s ire rises, so too does Caleb’s enjoyment of the interchange. If Sammy has barricaded himself in his room to get some peace and quiet from the onslaught on two fronts, Caleb sets out to find Teddy. Surprisingly, Teddy has much more patience for him, although even Teddy has his limits. It’s just a plain fact that 18-month-old little boys get in the way of a good game of cars, and cannot be tolerated. Their peaceful play usually ends when I hear, “Caleb, NO! Mom, could you come take Caleb please?” So much for dinner preparations.

It was with much delight and surprise, therefore, that Oli and I commented to each other just a few days ago about how peacefully the boys were playing downstairs. By the sounds of it they were playing with their toy kitchen, and were obviously engrossed in their meal preparations, which allowed me to complete mine. Anybody who’s a parent knows that you do not pick that moment to go check on the kids, because that will automatically break the spell, so we stayed upstairs, enjoying the rare moment of peace. After a while, Teddy invited me downstairs to see what they had been cooking. Expecting dinner at their restaurant, I made my way downstairs to see what they had been up to. When I arrived at the bottom of the stairs, Teddy excitedly proclaimed that they were giants, and that the little Playmobile people in the pots and pans were the people they were eating for breakfast. Too much Jack and the Beanstalk, perhaps? The scenario left me essentially speechless, so I turned around and went back upstairs. Pick your battles, right? That night, dinner on the table won.

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