Grumpy Teeth

Baby’s First Teeth

It may be true that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned but I think it’s also safe to say there are no torrential tantrums quite like those of a baby struggling with the dual issues of gas pains and teething.

And, truthfully, who can blame our quarter-pound progeny? They can’t use words to describe their pain and most babies teething are, for all intents and purposes, immobile. This severely limits their options for expressing displeasure.

Like the majority of us, the knowledge they have no control tints everything else in their life with a less-than-rosy tinge. Consider — when you put them on a blanket, on the blanket they stay. Even moving two feet requires a complicated combination of rolling from front to back, leg thrusting and back arching. If it were an adult performing these maneuvers we’d coo and cluck and tell them how sad it is they can’t get around… and get them a LifeCall so the paramedics would respond to their calls of, “Help me! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”

We aren’t so solicitous to the babies.

Bubby is a miserable wretch. He has two teeth breaking through and a gut full of gas I can probably blame on the broccoli I ate with lunch. That was a poor choice on many levels because A) I don’t like broccoli and B) it smells like toots even as it’s cooking and I know it won’t get better during the digestive process.

When it boils down to it, I believe my job as a mother is to accept responsibility for all things wrong with the world from the perspective of my children. Gas pain? Obviously, since he’s still nursing it’s my fault. Ran out of gum balls? I must have been chewing them on the sly! Can’t find the match to that shoe? It’s because I like to keep singleton shoes in a large pile under my bed next to the rolled up socks, to the left of the dust bunnies. Whatever ails you? Definitely my fault.

It’s always my fault. But I will refuse to pay for the therapy bills later, instead handing my children a rabbit and saying, “Go… tell your troubles to this fuzzy friend and stop complaining about me.” There’s a chance my children will actually be functional adults as a result of my breaking their heart a million times before they reach the age of five, at least that’s a part of my plan for world domination.

Until next time, my friends, I’ll be over here with the miserable baby. Have yourself a quiet evening.

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Copyright © StealingFaith.com 2010-2013 | All rights reserved

Used Up

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The saddest thing I think I ever see is an Olympic gymnastic gold medalist.

It’s not because I dislike the sport, on the contrary, it’s usually my favorite to watch out of all Olympic events.

It’s because I look at those prime athletes at the height of physical perfection and pinnacle of international success, and know they’ve hit their top. They’ve maxed out in their field of passion… yet they’re barely into double digits of years of life lived on this Earth.

What will they do? I think to myself, Now that they’ve got the rest of their life to live and it’s all downhill from here?

This is the foil to Henry David Thoreau:

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

What would you prefer, to sing your song too young and live the rest of your life waiting for the next high, or to have your song silenced by the endless eternity of waiting, what ifs, and caution?

It may be silly, to be so introspective, but this is the stuff I think of when I stare at my seven-year-old or analyze the eyelashes hooding my seven-month-old’s eyes.

If I can chart a course for them, what map points are included? Why? What shall I tell them is the point of this thing called life?

Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven Life settled the question for Christians – our life’s purpose is to glorify God. It’s a lovely big-picture goal but we all know the Devil is in the details.

As a parent, as the primary educator of my children, I want them to know that glory is in the life marathon, not the life sprint.

And I want them to win. I’m a highly competitive person – I can hardly pull up to a stop light without giving the car in the next lane a hard look-see to decide I could take them, if I wanted. I want my kids to be excellent. I want them to know the sweet taste of victory and have a grand sense of pluck, a knowledge that nothing thrown at them in this world has the ability to take them down and out.

But I also want them to lose. To know the sting of failure, and the abject horror of a humiliating loss. I don’t want these sad realities to be distant, hard to grasp, or something they think is reserved for others. They need to be tactile, real, and painful, so they know there are true, natural consequences.

Mostly, though, I want them to have hope that the best is still ahead of them. I want them to have the skill set needed to take an accurate assessment of circumstances and the ingenuity required to make the best of them. I pray they will lead inspiring lives, where words like integrity, compassion, humor, and vivacity come to mind when others hear their names.

Too big a job? Too grand a dream? Perhaps. But it’s not too much to admit I want the same big dreams for my own life, so that my song has been sung before I head to the grave myself.

“When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything You gave me.” (Erma Bombeck)

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Copyright © StealingFaith.com 2010-2013 | All rights reserved

Six Days… and Counting

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Six days after the dreaded virus hit me I’m ready to at least open the computer up and let you know I’m alive.

Up until now I’ve believed there is nothing a solid dose of NyQuil and rest can’t cure. I have been forced to admit my ignorance…

I didn’t go to the doctor but I’m pretty sure I’ve had the head/chest version of the flu and whatever it is, it ain’t pretty. As I type Uno is in bed with similar symptoms… so there’s a reasonable chance things are going to be a bit sketchy around her for awhile longer.

C’est la vie.

I have very little to offer you in the way of engaging stories because I haven’t been connected to the outside world in order to be engaging. But I will share that I discovered Downton Abbey. When looking at a screen hasn’t made my eyeballs feel like explosive devices I’ve watched that show – and I’m officially addicted. I’m seasons behind, so don’t give away the endings but I’m certain I’ll catch up soon!

Good night and may good health haunt your home.

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Copyright © StealingFaith.com 2010-2013 | All rights reserved

The Post Within Which I Correlate Weather Patterns and Rose Mofford’s Hair

Rose Mofford

If there were a hidden microphone around our house the last few days this is what would be recorded:

“Honey, do you want to *cough, cough* do that *cough, cough*… nevermind.” {snore}

“Daddy! My tummy hurts. Like a lot…” {puke}

I don’t know exactly what we’ve contracted but it hasn’t been pretty around the OK Corral. We’ve got phlegm, mucous, bile and vomit in abundance, patience and gentleness in short supply.

This morning I woke up about two hours earlier than normal because I couldn’t stop coughing. When I stumbled into the kitchen I discovered a distinct last of coffee – which is the closest thing to a natural disaster I can imagine that doesn’t involve precipitation, great splits of the earth, or wind velocities that would tamper with Rose Mofford’s hair.

And that’s the end of that. Hope to be back tomorrow with better *cough, cough* news. {puke}

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Copyright © StealingFaith.com 2010-2013 | All rights reserved

Potty Note

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My Dear Children:

I am about to enter the restroom of our home. During this time I will be indulging in activities necessary for continued function as a human being. I realize my absence may cause you insecurity, as I am in your sight for roughly 23.75 hours of each day. However, I respectfully request you observe the following items while I am occupied:

Do not put beads in the baby’s nose. Along these lines please do not use your foot to violently push/kick the baby swing or attempt to use the baby as your tango dance partner.
Do not take this time to fall off of the top bunk of the bed. There is no reason to be leaning off of the side of the bed, pretending your body is a practical extension of Rapunzel’s hair, despite your joy in pretending to be a princess.
Do not grasp this unmonitored time as an opportunity to rummage through the refrigerator. We eat at regular intervals throughout the day and are blessed with plenty of food. Cold salsa and butter do not a meal make – trust me to provide for your hunger at lunch, snack and dinner.
Art supplies are to be used for art projects, not face painting. True artistry takes longer than three minutes to produce, so it is unlikely you will be able to paint the bottom of the kitchen table as the roof of the Sistine Chapel in the time it takes me to empty my bladder. You get an “A” for creative effort, however.
It is an unlikely dog that prefers to have beads placed up its nose. Please leave the dog alone. I understand that our dog is a Great Dane and physically larger than the majority of you children, however, that does not mean it should be ridden as a horse.
While I admire your enthusiasm for cleaning, please do not dismantle the vacuum cleaner while I am in the potty. The vacuum bag has a tricky way of expelling its contents over the room when unhinged from the machine. This typically makes your mama unhinge as well.

Thank you for your attention to these recommendations. I suspect, knowing your ingenuity, there will be several more activities you would like to try while I am visiting the facility. DO NOT FOLLOW THROUGH ON THESE IDEAS, no matter how enticing they may be.

When in doubt, sit on your hands and stare at the ceiling fan. Allow your Mama to poop in peace – we’ll all be the better for it.

Love,

Mama

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Copyright © StealingFaith.com 2010-2013 | All rights reserved

The Truth About Homeschooling

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I’ve stepped into a leadership role with my local Classical Conversations community that has me meeting with prospective parents frequently to explain the program and how CC might work for them.

I love it, absolutely love it! Because if it weren’t for Classical Conversations there’s a reasonable chance I wouldn’t even consider homeschooling as a viable option for our family. At the risk of sounding like a complete CC Kool-Aid drinker, this academic community has made all the difference in our life and opened up the world for our children.

Even so, sometimes I feel a little guilty that I don’t add the “downer” side of homeschooling to my conversations with people about whether this is a party they want to join. To clear my conscience, I’m going to go public with some of the negatives of homeschooling right here and now…

1. You’re going to have to actually school them. The real bummer about homeschooling is those kids – they don’t just teach themselves. And school? It happens every day. There are no sick days, you can’t sleep in for fun, and your kids are used to getting your attention so they get a tad presumptuous about your time. There’s no one you can send them off to or blame when they don’t perform as well as anticipated.

2. Unrealistic Expectations. Let’s face it, we all want kids who do something exceedingly well or else the “how to tell if your child is gifted” post wouldn’t be one of the most popular on BabyCenter. Homeschoolers are the worst about this. “Did I mention my 4 year old is able to recite Plato and complete advanced geometry problems? Oh, I didn’t? Don’t worry. The public school will teach your little Susie to wipe the drool from her chin by the end of 6th grade, I’m certain.” Sheesh! We read statistics about kids who are home educated winning spelling bees and doing well academically and dream that our kiddo will be the Next Big Thing. But take a moment to realize an important fact: they’re your kids. If YOU weren’t a member of Mensa or a Top Shot… chances are simply doing school around your kitchen table won’t make them phenomenal.

3. It’s lonely. There was a time I described staying at home full time as akin to putting ground glass on my eyeballs… and I meant it. I love my children to an insane degree but I think I’m pretty close to the worst person possible to be a full-time stay at home mom. This is likely why I’ve also worked for all but about seven months of my mom life – I need the adult interaction and challenges provided by employment. Even now, working full-time from home, I struggle with the loneliness of homeschooling. Being a part of a co-op makes this journey feasible… you have someone to commiserate with on a regular basis as well as people to celebrate the awesome achievements of your kiddos!

4. You see your ugly side. There was a time I never, ever raised my voice. In fact, I would cry if I was around people yelling or even loud noises. Home schooling has taught me I have a short temper. There’s a little switch in me that pops its overload setting when I have a load of laundry that must go into the dryer, dinner cooking on the stove, a baby crying at my feet and a grade schooler asking me if I have ever tried to draw a picture of Charlemagne’s horse and whether the mane should be black or brown… all at the same time! I crack, sometimes daily. This gives me the opportunity to be humble. (Oh, joy! Oh, rapture! An opportunity to demonstrate faith!)

5. You question your value. When you’re at home, wondering if your child will ever figure out how to read or write or add or subtract, you begin to doubt whether you’re doing enough. You read what the “experts” say, you try to gauge yourself against others… what you really do is practice insecurity. It’s eternal, this responsibility you have for your kid and your concern that you’re just not living up to their potential, that you’re holding them back. There is no boss who pulls you in for a performance review, followed by a pay raise. And that stinks.

After all these negatives, I think it’s important to mention we do homeschool and aren’t planning to change that anytime soon. For our family, it’s worth it because this aligns with our values. (But it’s not always just peachy.)

What are your highs and lows regarding home education?

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Copyright © StealingFaith.com 2010-2013 | All rights reserved

Pinholes

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I spent the day limping between two locations in my house: the bed and the sofa. Staying up all night with Bubby two nights ago, along with having a touch of a cold myself had me feeling pretty low.

Fortunately my family was able to come to my rescue. While I was recuperating my kids were playing with their cousins and having a ball.

Life can be good like that.

It’s the small moments we need, the joyful ones that catch us off guard and make us guffaw, the glimpses into eternity we get when we sit so quietly we hear our breath.

Ann Voskamp writes: “A pail with a pinhole loses as much as the pail pushed right over. A whole life can be lost in minutes wasted, small moments missed.”

As I sat and listened to the chatter of children I committed myself, once again, to listening. To not missing the moments of hilarity because I have socks that need sorting. Those socks present as an emergency, knitted cotton threatening to remove all seating in the living room, but they aren’t the emergency. The emergency is in the little drops of life I miss because I get distracted by the grind of life.

What are some of the drops of life I don’t want to miss?

My husband’s smile when he comes in the door after being gone.
The sound of my baby’s laughter.
The sparkle in Tres’ eye as she tells a joke and mentions to me that her favorite number is six.
The beauty of Dos’ smile, with her teeth lined up perfect and tiny. Those teeth will be falling out all too soon.
The thoughtfulness of my bossy eldest who is trying so hard to be grown up.
A chance to scratch the ears of my pooch and see the tail thump hard.
Getting a snuggle with a rabbit and marveling at its gentleness.

These aren’t shocking drips of life. But they’re important, the glue that holds my sanity and joy together. I don’t want to miss them by accident!

What are your drops of life?

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Copyright © StealingFaith.com 2010-2013 | All rights reserved

Homeschool Biography

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I’m at a training meeting for Classical Conversations. As you know, I love the program and think it’s been amazingly effective for our family – and this training has been consistently thought-provoking and encouraging.

Our assignment tonight was to write a short biography for ourselves that could eventually be posted on the CC website. If you’ve never written your own introduction, you should know it’s about as much fun as trying to thread a needle by moonlight or talk a two-year-old into not swallowing their chewing gum. It’s much easier to write about other people than yourself!

A few of us got together, and, as creative inspiration, decided to write a spoof-bio utilizing home school misperceptions while also using our most horrible writing. The result had me rolling on the floor, laughing, with tears streaming down my face. There’s a chance this won’t be funny to you at all if you’re not a home educator (or you don’t have a pulse), but I’m going to take a risk and share it with you tonight:

“I love homeschooling! It’s so awesome to stay in my pajamas, not shower, and eat bon-bons all day while teaching my kids quantum physics. Every night I brush my floor-length hair with at least 100 strokes, sometimes 104 strokes if I took a bicycle ride with the children during the day. My preferred attire is a denim jumper, which has also always inspired my husband, as evidenced by our 15 children aged 10 and under (which I dress in matching clothes). I discovered CC through a magalog left at my local Rod and Gun club. One day, while swapping stories about birthing goats, I learned my favorite 4H friend also attended CC and decided to check it out. The rest is history!

I find the repetition that CC offers to be repetitive. We love repeating the memory work repetitiously. If I had it to do all over again, I would do it all over again. CC rocks!

People have always wanted to follow in my footsteps. I am humble enough to know that I am a natural-born leader. I have a vision of creating a “cult-like” following of Leigh Bortins in the region through one-day and eventually three-day Leigh-a-thons. CC was our family’s Polish Rambo*.”

I do hope you have a smile on your face. I promise I don’t have flowing locks I’m busy brushing.

*The Polish Rambo reference should be confusing to you. It is from a story we learned last night regarding the Global Home Education Conference held in Germany in 2012. One of the attendees shared the story of a child being placed in foster care because the parents were choosing to home school. The lawyer for the family described the refuge status and said there was a Polish Rambo available for hire to steal the child away if they could only raise enough money to pay for the helicopter. It was a sobering story – and highlighted the freedom we take for granted in the U.S.! Thank you to the Home school Legal Defense Association for protecting our freedom of educational choice!

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Uncommon

What’s in the box??

Just about the time you think you have this parenting thing figured out your daughter goes and urinates in a shoebox.

Well, not a shoebox, exactly. It’s a box purse with hard sides like a shoe box and I’m incredibly grateful to report it is water-tight for short periods of time. Like the length of time it takes a two-year-old to walk from the living room to the kitchen and say, “I go potty!”

Add that length of time to the minutes needed to scrape my jaw off the floor and go on a “listening tour” of the house, locate the box filled with yellow liquid, and dispose of both bodily fluids and box and you have the final sum total of minutes the box remained leak-proof.

Now you know the highlight of my day.

I find it interesting this took place on the day I was considering one of Ann Voskamp’s 10 Helps for Really Busy Moms: “Motherhood is a hallowed place because children aren’t commonplace.”

When I started thinking about this truism, I had very different thoughts. I paused to reflect on the intrigue possessed by each of my children, how they can look so similar and yet possess unique personalities, strengths and weaknesses. I took the time to pat myself on the back because I am dedicating myself to a hard calling – motherhood! – and not giving up even though it is physically taxing and emotionally challenging every day.

Then my child used a box purse as a toilet and all the sweet, insightful thoughts flew straight out the window and I started focusing on this idea: children aren’t commonplace.

“Commonplace” is an adjective meaning, “Having no remarkable features, characteristics, or traits; ordinary.”

Yes, commonplace does NOT describe children. Or a life with children.

I guess that’s a good thing. I didn’t want an ordinary life anyway.

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve seen a child do?

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The Lump On My Chest

JK Images

I’m sitting in bed typing with one hand, still wearing my sweatshirt because I have this wonderful lump of a little boy asleep on my chest and I’m just not willing to put him down.

These moments of sweetness, they surprise me. The unreasonable amount of love I feel is overwhelming as I listen to his heavy breathing, little chest movements that try to shake him from his perch against my shoulder into a slumped puddle around my belly…

There are times when the emotion of motherhood is so raw and so encompassing I feel like a leaf flying in front of a hurricane.

I look back at the last six months and I can no longer even imagine what life would have been like if he hadn’t been born. I grieve that I wouldn’t have known how he would nudge the boundaries of my heart larger and fill my world with more light.

This is the emotion that makes me pause when we talk about whether our family is complete. It’s easy to say we are done having children when I’m in the midst of incessant requests and a tsunami of emotion, when I look at my gray hairs and realize I’m more adept at quoting child-rearing theories these days than articulating intended outcomes, cost/benefit plans, and navigating organizational politics.

To be honest, I crave the days when things were orderly, when the shoulders of my shirts didn’t sport various forms of mucous, when my time was my own to direct. There was never a layer of dust on the leaves of the potted plants and when I went shopping I never stopped in the toy section just to see if there were any amazing new products.

From my current chaotic state I look at the clean lines of that life and sigh.

Then I take another look, this one influenced by the memory of daily laughter, awe, mystery, curiosity, and humility, and realize the emptiness of my previous life of order. Child rearing is the hardest job I was never prepared for, and some days I want to cry, to rage, to quit….

But then I feel this little body huddled on my chest and my arms don’t have the strength to put him down because I realize his presence is my blessing, a genuine miracle wearing 6-9 month footie pajamas!

I can’t imagine what I would have missed had he never been born.

And I am replenished to stand up for another day, to give my all to this battle once more and relish the treasure of childhood.

Courage doesn’t always roar.

Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying,

“I will try again tomorrow.”

- Mary Anne Radmacher

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Stealing Faith

humor for relationships, family & life

Category Archives: Parenting

Grumpy Teeth

Used Up

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

Six Days… and Counting

The Post Within Which I Correlate Weather Patterns and Rose Mofford’s Hair

Potty Note

The Truth About Homeschooling

Pinholes

Homeschool Biography

Uncommon

The Lump On My Chest