Bedtime

Every night it is the same. After teeth are brushed and good night kisses are doled out to the rest of the family, Graham and I sneak down to his room for our time. I turn his sound machine on and quietly whisper “lay on mama,” and he gladly complies and lays his head pressed into the crook of my neck, the place it seems, like many parts of my body, that has been created for his particular needs. I feel his steady, slowly deepening breath tickling my skin and the tiny movements of his hand on my back, somehow saying through his skin that he needs this time just as much as I do.

I know, because I’ve done this whole thing before, that I won’t know when it will be the last time we do this little dance. That one day he will wiggle from my arms and crawl into his bed by himself, and that will be that. So this time around I hold on as tightly as I can, and  I slow down time all around me and let the things waiting for me to do upstairs, wait. I know he is my last baby, the last one who will press his body against mine as he slowly gives in to sleep. It is a blessing to know that when your children are babies each moment is fleeting. It means you get to enjoy them more readily, cherish them more deeply, and take the time to remember the little details that make the memories that will one day make up the whole of your life.

A Post About Underwear

As I go about my days in this insanity I call my life with two little boys under three I often think random things and have absolutely no one to tell. For some reason my little men don’t like it when I talk about anything besides trucks, cars, or that isn’t some kind of sound effect (weird). When I am having these conversations with myself sometimes I think, “maybe I’ll update my Facebook status with that little tidbit,” and then I realize no one cares about the thoughts I am having while folding underwear (and by folding underwear I mean balling it up and making sure it ends up in the right drawer. But folding makes me sound so much more domestic.) The good news is I just now realized that I have a blog that I don’t think anyone reads and if you do you specifically come here to hear what I have to say.  So without further ado here is my much anticipated list of underwear folding (*cough* bunching *cough*) thoughts.

1.The minute I put lotion on my hands someone will poop so I will have to wash them again which will make the lotion application a complete waste of time.

2.There is no such thing as “done with the laundry.” There is “doing laundry” and there is “not doing laundry, i.e. your house is gradually and rapidly being overcome with laundry.”

3. If you vacuum, someone is going to spill there entire meal on the floor.

4. If you buy a new rug, someone is going to vomit on it almost immediately

5. The percentage chance of your children napping is equal to the amount which you need said nap     time to recover your sanity. I think this is a real equation, look it up.

6. If you suddenly get the inspiration to go to the gym regularly it is fact that everyone will take turns getting sick in your home for the next month, preventing you from taking the children to the childcare room. Unless you are the kind of mom that pretends your kids aren’t sick so when you take them to the gym and they throw up on all the toys you can say “that’s so weird, he was completely fine this morning,” I’m looking at you, lady at my gym who did that one time and didn’t fool anyone.

7. You will have a day when you are exhausted and emotionally drained and pray your kids go to sleep early. And then they do and an hour later you will find yourself sitting there going through pictures of them on your phone.

8. Some days, you just need to go to the gym and then sit on your butt and eat two huge cookies and not feel even a little bit bad about it.

9. I’m pretty sure that before the fall dogs didn’t shed.

Were you expecting something a little more profound in that list? Sorry, I don’t have the energy for profound. But apparently I do spend a lot of time thinking about food, how easily everything gets dirty, and laundry. Your welcome, world. If your really lucky there might just be a part two in your future. So now you have something else to look forward to besides season 3 of Downton Abbey.

A Beautiful Life

The sun is filtering through the trees as it makes its quiet ascent to its place in the morning sky. The air is cool and still and the birds are calling to each other from all around me as I write. And a sun-faded red car with its one wobbly wheel sits abandoned next to me on the deck where it was forgotten about for some other toy yesterday.

When I was younger I always wanted to be surrounded by beautiful things. I would only listen to certain music or read certain books, and refused to let anything in my home or on my body that I felt didn't measure up to the image I was trying to present. If you would have told 22-year-old me that I would have cheap looking plastic toys in my house for my children I would have thought you were crazy. And that you just didn't get me.

In the last few years I have felt this very present tension within myself between that old desire and the realities of the life I lead now. I used to spend hours online scouring the internet for the latest indie band and read forums and obscure websites trying to find beautiful music, which I would listen to locked in my room while reading along with the CD liner and maybe crying (just a little). These days I listen to whatever is right in front of me, sometimes a CD (yep I still use those crazy old-fashioned things) and sometimes (22-year-old self please cover your ears) a good song on the radio. I used to sit beneath the tress and watch the clouds move and change above them as I pondered God and life and love and all its mysteries and lately I spend my time on such philosophical questions as, "what should I make for dinner that my 2 year old will actually eat," and "is that poop or chocolate, please tell me that's chocolate."

I'm starting to realize this tension I feel doesn't have to exist. That the addition of the faded plastic toy car in the picture of my idyllic morning doesn't ruin the frame, it only adds to it. That is the car that my children push each other around in, their squeals of laughter filling up the backyard as they tumble out of it. That is the car they push around with their chubby little feet. And it is also the car they use to bring me treasures like pretend ice cream cones and hot dogs that they present with chubby dirt-stained hands and expectant faces. I can't imagine anything more beautiful, more perfect, than the happiness of my children. I can't picture something I could buy, or wear, or hear that would bring my more joy than their joy. And I don't care if it is ugly toys or really crappy music (didn't I mention Everett's favorite song is a Selena Gomez number?). What is better, beautiful things or a beautiful life?

To reconcile my desire to find the beauty in this world and the realization that there is beauty in so many more things than my 22-year-old self dared realize might be the greatest gift that my 30's has to offer.

Ghosts

(I wrote this in November and kept changing my mind about posting it. But the truth is this is more me than probably any other post I will or would write, and I want this space to be documentation of who I really am and what was really going on at this time in our lives. Also, if people don't want to read it they don't have to. Which is totally obvious, but sometimes I forget that.)

There is nothing sadder than thinking you see someone you know across the room and realizing it can’t be them (it can’t be them) because they are dead. This time of year brings ghosts into our lives that for the rest of the year stay silent. I’m not talking about real ghosts, but the people in our lives that we lost and the way they still exist for us, somewhere in our brain or our hearts, maybe a little of both.

I am thirty years old and my heart is filled to the brim with ghosts.

Yesterday I was walking through the grocery store and thought I saw an old co-worker. Not the kind of old co-worker that you see and that you hope you don’t see you because you didn’t have that much to talk about when you saw each other everyday, so you dread the awkward conversation of two people who no longer have even geography in common. No, I’m talking about the coworker that made me laugh, that kept me sane. The one who tried to give me sage advice because, at ten years my senior, he looked at me as a little sister or daughter, depending on the day. The one (of only two) I invited to my wedding. But I didn’t see him because he is lost to me, ever since I got a phone call from his number years after we worked together. When I picked it up and greeted the caller with “Hey stranger!” and it was just that. His sweet wife who I didn’t know at all, calling to tell me that he would be someone I thought I would see in the grocery store, years later, but would not.

Last night as I was trying to go to sleep I kept thinking about my Noni’s date cookies. They were the most un-kid friendly cookie ever invented. Something your Noni from Italy would make instead of your Grandma from California. Yet every time I would spend the night at her house there would be a frozen roll of those cookies waiting to be thawed out, sliced, and baked just for me. I laid there, last night, thinking I would do just about anything to see her veiny, weathered fingers slicing her knife through that hard frozen roll of cookie dough. But she is gone as well, and with her, the smells of her kitchen and the feeling of her small, bony body underneath my own as we rocked in her pink easy chair. There is something different about the way you see people that you didn’t get to have around into adulthood, innocence and selfishness blurring the edges of your memories. All they can be is what they were to you because it is almost impossible for a child to see past that. How tragic that such a long life has been whittled down to cookies and rocking chairs in my mind. A woman who lived through more war years than not, more hard times than good, that spoke a language I did not understand into her kitchen phone to people that were and still are a mystery to me.

My dad died when I was nineteen. I write that sentence easily, the easiest seven words I could ever type, because I live that sentence. Every big moment in my life, every sad day, every time my boy does something to make someone else laugh, there is the marked and tangible absence of him. He is a myth I will tell my children someday, a part of myself that those closest to me will never know. A person that I don’t even really know, another victim of a life oversimplified by those who remember him. I don’t even have the mundane details of daily life to keep him tethered to reality for me, having not lived with him since I was a baby. All I have is the stories people tell me of him and the memories I try to hold onto like paper floating away in the wind.

The first boy I ever loved died when I was twenty, before I was old enough to realize what real love felt like, and that what I felt for him was not it. The first time I saw him we were fifteen and he was walking past me in the hallway of my high school and it was like I was living in a Taylor Swift song, everything was in slow motion. Years later I would feel like I knew him better than anyone in the world, and even more years later I would realize I didn’t know him at all, and that maybe no one really knew him. He was the kind of person that was born to be a legend, someone that had a way of existing for each person that loved him exactly how they saw him in their mind. I am not happy he is gone because I know there are people whose lives go on with the marked absence of him. But I am glad that the person he exists as in my mind can never be ruined by the imperfection of a flawed reality.

The ghosts that we know remind us of who we are, our truest selves, because they are a part of that person. They aren’t just stories we tell or people we knew, they are wrapped up in who we are for having known them.  That is how lost loved ones go on existing.

Graham is One

On Saturday we celebrated my last baby's first birthday. I know he is my last because when I imagine a world in which I get pregnant again I instantly get a stomachache and try to thing of who I could give the child to...so I'm pretty sure we are done.

I can not believe that Graham is one already. I scooped my last scoop of formula the other day and then I cried. I got an email from babycenter.com about "my toddler this week" instead of "my baby this week" and I cried. I can't say that I'm not a little bit excited to be moving out of the baby stage but knowing that these last fleeting moments of chubby baby legs and sweet baby snuggles truly are the last, I can't help but mourn a bit. However, since I got pregnant with Graham when Everett was only 8 months old I have had an extra long run of non stop baby, so I would like to think that I really got the most bang for my buck of the baby years.

Graham entered into his first birthday with four teeth and one more on the way. He is the toughest little baby you will ever meet and when he is playing with Everett and they bonk heads or both fall down, he usually laughs and Ev usually cries. He is literally the hungriest baby in the universe and would eat non-stop all day if he had the opportunity. Everett is going through a picky phase and is hardly eating anything so Graham usually finishes up all of his leftovers. You only know he is done eating when he smears his food into his hair, which is adorable but also means he is never clean, ever. He is quite opinionated, well I'll just say it, demanding. He always wants to be held by his mama and always wants to be wherever the action is. He reaches out his little arms and screams at whatever he wants until he gets it. His brother didn't do this so I have a feeling Graham will be the assertive one.

For his party this year we wanted (let's be honest, I wanted) it have a cute little tee pee and cool Indian headbands, and he got both. It's always funny spending so much time on a party for someone who could care less, but event planning is kind of my love language so hopefully my boys learn to love a good theme.

Two Years and Ten Months, Respectively

This is Everett before it turned cold and drizzly out. The longer I am a parent the less pictures I take so forgive the less than current picture, but you get the idea. He is two years and 3 months old. He is, how do you say, the freakin' most awesome kid I've ever met. I was so scared that he would wake up on his second birthday and be the "terrible two" tornado you are always warned (aka threatened) about. But he has continued to be even keeled and friendly. Of course he has his moments of irrational anger and there are times he wakes up from his nap and there is someone over that he usually loves and he will refuse to look at them or acknowledge there existence. But who doesn't have moments like these, even in adult life. His favorite things right now are Curious George, my iPhone, and popcorn. He could eat popcorn for every meal if we let him. He is sweet and accommodating, and if his brother is crying he will say "brother OK mama?" in a concerned and caring voice that just kills me. The last few nights when I put him to bed he will pat his little pillow and say, "lay with me mama?" and I just dare someone to turn down that adorable request.

Our chubby little baby boy is slowly turning into a little boy and everyday it seems like a little more baby fat has disappeared of his little frame, which makes me sad, but excited to see what kind of boy he will turn into. He truly is a joy.

 This is Graham. He will be ten months in ten days. Our little skinny baby is now a full on fatty. He eats everything in sight. You can't put something in your mouth around him without him crying and looking at you like you haven't fed him in weeks. I can't seem to feed him often enough. I think as sweet as Everett is will be how strong willed Graham is. He knows exactly what he wants and will let you know it. Usually what he wants is for me to pick him up and hold him. He will be contentedly playing in the living room and if he hears my voice in the kitchen he will immediately start crying for me to come get him. Everett was a complete daddy's boy at this age and Graham doesn't care about anyone but me. Sometimes it feels a little suffocating, but I know one day soon I will miss this sweet time when I was his whole universe. He is getting more and more steady on his feet and has recently started being able to walk while holding on to the couch. He is strong and sweet and loves to be held upside-down and tickled. He also REALLY loves bottles and can drink them faster than any baby I have ever seen. He loves when Everett talks to him or plays with him and can now clap when you ask him to and will "dance" if there is music on, which looks a lot like baby pelvic thrusting which is hilarious and a little disturbing. 

I am so in love with my boys. I am starting to see the beginning stages of the two of them playing together and discovering how to be brothers and it is so much fun.

When Worlds Collide

I just realized today why being a stay at home mom feels so hard. Right now I am listening with one ear to the monitor for signs that my nephew is awake from his nap while feeding my 10 month old a disgusting meal of gummed down biscuit that he consumes like a pack of wild dogs going after a bone, all while my two year old sleeps peacefully downstairs. While doing all these things it came to me that I have just never worked this hard in my entire life. The days I spend with my children are relentless, unending marathons of picking up messes, making meals, playing with cars and trucks and too many things that make too many noises, and of course changing an infinite number of diapers.  Too many of which, by the way, require a change of clothes for all of us after the deed is done.

It should go without saying that I love it and LOVE my children. Even when it's hard and overwhelming, one little smile from my baby or funny comment from my toddler and my heart is so  full that I think it might burst. I wouldn't trade it for a day job. (Unfortunately i feel obligated to say that because mommy guilt kicks in and I worry that I will be judged for complaining about my children, or taking the blessing of being with them everyday for granted. For the record, I am an awesome mom and my kids are super awesome, and yes sometimes I want to hide in my room while they fight it out Hunger Games style). But every job I have worked up until now, no matter how busy or fast-paced I thought it was, did not hold a candle to this. The jobs I've had outside the home have been at least somewhat self-paced...meaning I could pick how hard I chose to work or how much I would try to get done in a shift. There might be a demanding boss, and sometimes customers or clients, but if I wanted to be crappy at my job, I could be. Or, I might have worked my butt off, but at least there was a break or a lunch on the horizon, or the joy of joys, the end of the work day.  But being a stay at home mom has absolutely nothing to do with me  and there is no pause button or stop button, and definitely no mute button (which would sometimes be the button of choice, let's be honest). I can't choose how hard I work because children have to be fed and changed and entertained and especially in this phase of life, there is no way that they can rely on themselves for any of these things. They need me for absolutely everything in their lives and the work isn't done until they decide it is by finally going to sleep at which time I usually fall into the couch and stay in that position until I get the energy to go to bed. 

Yesterday I spent a few too many hours dwelling and wallowing on this fact. "Just one minute to do what I want," I thought to myself, while angrily washing one more dish and soothing another crying child. I went to a dark place of bitterness and jealousy and selfishness that I'm not really proud of. But eventually kids do go to sleep and there is a moment to take a breath, after putting away the ocean of toys I spent the day tripping over and cleaning up the remnants of the days meals from the kitchen. And when I had a second of rational thought I realized something. This is exactly what my life is supposed to look like right now. It is no accident that God has been working through my issues with idolatry of self that I wrote about in my last post while I am in a stage of life that is the perfect place to let that work happen. What better way to cut away the love of self than to be in a place where I have almost no time to think about/worry about/even acknowledge myself? What better way to kill the demon of want and consumerism and vanity than being stuck in the house with three kids and only the energy to throw on some sweat pants and my hair in a ponytail?

A funny thing happens when you ask God to move. He does. And you want it to be this magical experience where you wake up and all of a sudden you don't care about the dumb things you used to and you feel this supernatural love and joy and peace and your children's crying all of the sudden sounds like angels singing and you could care less how much money is in your bank account or how many pairs of jeans you own. But it doesn't really happen that way. It happens in the way it's happening right now. You capture what is vile in you and offer it up to Christ in repentance, and then he starts working on you and in you, and it is usually hard and painful and stretching in ways you didn't really sign up for, if you are honest. But it is also pure JOY, because you realize how pure, how TRUE the gospel is. How petty the things of this world truly are when held up next to Jesus and his infinite power and how beautiful it is when you feel that power inside of you.

When I made this connection I could do nothing else but worship, to thank God for loving me enough to want me to be better, to be changed.  Colossians 3:1-4 says 

"If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at teh right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory."

My life is hidden with Christ in God, what?? My gross, jealous, bitter, selfish life is hidden behind His perfect one? If that doesn't make you WANT to be better, to kill those things in you as an act of worship and thanks for that being true I don't know what will. Because that is the truly beautiful thing about this whole thing. It is already done. All these things are already hidden in Him and my perfection is complete because it is HIS perfection that God sees in me. But he still chooses to work in us because he knows we need it, that life is better when are attentions and desires are towards Him and not the things of this world. Thank you Jesus, for loving me more than I even can comprehend.

Being a mom to little ones is hard, really hard. The knowledge that it is supposed to be hard doesn't change that, but it does give me something to cling to in those moments when the dishes are piling up and the baby is crying. My prayer is that my children see this struggle, somehow see and remember this time when there mom is learning how to cling to Jesus amid the biscuit crumbs and toy cars. And that they will learn to cling to him, too.