Over the last few days, I've been skimming through Dr. Kevin Leman's Becoming the Parent God Wants You to Be.
I picked it up from the church library after one of those weeks when I figured my fertility must have been oversight on God's part. "Oh no, Annie had kids? That wasn't supposed to happen..."

Yeah, yeah, one of those. And after one of those conversations in which a recently-returned-to-town friend casually threw out the, "So, what are you guys up to? What's been going on with you lately?" bomb-of-a-question.

Eh? I wanted to say, Do you see these small people following me? They are what has been going on lately, and as far as I can tell, they are what will be going on for the next ten or fifteen or (dear God please help me) twenty years. That's what I'm up to.

I held my tongue and said something vague and more appropriate. One of these days, though...

Anyway, on to the point, which I have now forgotten. Oh, yes, the book. The book that I brought home and which subsequently sat on my desk until another one of those weeks went by, at which point I pulled it out and thought, Maybe this would be more helpful if I read it.

Indeed.

"...godly parenting means treating your children the way God treats us, His children. He lovingly helps us make wise decisions about the realities of life." (p. 21)

The line "treating your children the way God treats us" made me stop and think. God is not a taskmaster. God is not set on vengeance. God is not offended by our failures. God is not demanding our perfection. God is available. God is listening. God is speaking in ways I can understand, over and over again until I get it. God is not interested in the outward appearance, but in the heart. God is understanding, loving, gentle, kind, and merciful. God is truthful, firm, strong, and secure. God is happy: the joy of the Lord is my strength. How can He give me joy if He doesn't have it Himself?

Ready for the obvious translation?

I should not be a taskmaster over my children. I should not be set on vengeance toward myself, for failing, or toward anyone else. I should not be offended my my children's failures. I should not be demanding their perfection. I should be available. I should be listening, aware, watching. I should be speaking in ways that my children can understand, over and over again until they get it. I should not be so interested in how they look and should be completely interested in their little hearts. I should be understanding, loving, gentle, kind, and merciful. I should be truthful, firm, strong, and secure. (Not wavering. Not a pendulum.) I should be happy, too. It's good to be happy.

I say "should be" not to pour guilt on myself or anyone else but to show us all what is possible.
Of course, with man these things are impossible. They are too high, too wide, too deep for my narrowness. But with God... with God...
all things are possible.

My goal is for my children to be as independent as they can be without hurting themselves or ignoring my authority.

Guilt-Free Independence

The only way children can have guilt-free independence is to be given clear limits and designated areas of freedom within those limits. Independence, too, is not the freedom to do whatever, whenever, however you want without regard to others. No true Christian ever has the "right" to that kind of irresponsibility, falsely deemed independence or freedom.

Freedom comes with limits, automatically, and the right way to teach children the real nature of freedom is to give them independence within certain constraints. For example, Read the rest of this entry »

What you do or don't do in the morning sets the tone and effects the outcome of the rest of your day. It's not that you can't recover from a difficult morning, but it's much better to start the day off right than try to recoup what's left of it. Our bad habits, lack of habits, lack of planning, lack of self-discipline, and over-achiever tendencies conspire against us to make mornings miserable. The way you handle your morning matters for the rest of your day, and since your life is simply the sum of your days, you could sum it up like this: how you handle the first few hours of your day says a lot about what your whole life is and will be. Read the rest of this entry »

I'm always there. I'm overseeing every moment of their little lives. Even on bad hair days.

They may not know it, but
I'm always close, watching, listening, protecting. Why? Right now, it's about guiding and training their behavior, protecting them from any sort of abuse, and guarding their little hearts from fear, insecurity, confusion.
That means I don't just blithely send them off to whatever activity or childcare is offered. My default is that they stay with me. I want to know what's going on with them, what they're experiencing. I have to be there to know that.

I choose very carefully the people who take care of them when I need a sitter - it's grandparents or Aunties or, very rarely, a single gal I know and trust who has a great track record with us. I have a few other standbys - married women who are raising/have raised kids in the same kind of protecting, nurturing way - but every there I'm careful, prayerful. Paranoid? Maybe, but I don't think so. These children - my children - are innocent little travelers in a big, rough world.

They'll grow up and be capable of handling it, but that's not for a while yet. Right now their hearts and minds are so tender, impressionable. A scary cartoon has a big effect. If I let them loose into a world of confusing, conflicting adult standards, the number of negative experiences would increase 1000%. Not all would be really bad. A kid doesn't have to be abused to become hurt, scared, and unsure about right and wrong.
I want my children to grow up to be adults who know right and wrong as absolutes and who have a positive, optimistic outlook. Differing standards and negative experiences undermine those two goals. No, I can't control everything. I'm not saying I always say no, or that I never let them out to learn and interact. I am saying this, though: I'm there.

I'm there to see what happens, to explain, to shield, to provide security and reason even when things are difficult. I tell my kids the truth. When our dog died, I told them. When they asked if Gigi (my step Mom) was my Mommy, I explained: No, my Mommy died. (Their answer: Like our doggie died? Yes, kids, death is death.)
They live in this fallen world too and they can't be shielded from all pain, nor should they be. But I'm in charge of their pain management. Joe and I are the interpreters of the world for them. When big scary things happen, we are there to put it in context for them. And you don't know what a big scary thing is to them unless you're there.

So. Unless one of my tried-and-true, trusted sitters is available, our kids stay with me. And even when the sitters are available, most of the time our kids stay with me. I love them. I want them with me. I want to be there. We leave them maybe twice a month for a date night out. Other times we have date night in (better dress code...).
I pass on most Mommy's Day Out, drop and shop, etc programs where there are way too many factors out of my control. Every week or two, when I get claustrophobic and need time to be me-sans-Mommyness, Joe keeps the kids at home and I go out for a couple of hours.

For classes and fun stuff like dance or gym or sports that I want them to be part of (and there aren't many), I make sure 1) it's a group deal with 2+ adults there at all times and 2) I stay and watch to see how things go for a while before I leave, IF I leave and 3) I'm always early for pickup time, to see how things wrap up and to be sure my child isn't left alone unsupervised or uncertain about what's net. I avoid situations that I can't predict with accuracy when it comes to leaving my children.

That's the place I've come to with my kids. They are very young right now, and as they grow we will have a bit more freedom. But I come back to this truth: these little people are given to me as a trust. No one else has the heart and instinct and mind to mother my children, because God gave that to me. I'm their Mom, and these days of intensive mothering are few and swiftly passing. I want to make the most of them.

(Poor kids. This means they're definitely going to end up weird like me. Mwahahaha.)

What do you think? How do you handle the endless opportunities for outings? What are you standards? How do you fit in alone time?

This post is part of the 30-Minute Blogging Challenge at SteadyMom.

"The training of children is no mere side-issue; it is the main business of those of us who are parents."

I realized today that the reason I most often get frustrated with my children is that I am frustrated with myself. I've gotten behind, I've lost focus, I'm having a bad hair day... For one reason or another, I'm not meeting my personal goals. I'm not being consistent and diligent with myself, and that becomes (too quickly) me not being consistent and diligent with my children. And how quickly that escalates into lots of whining, lots of nagging, lots of tears, lots of frustration. The kids don't do so well, either...

It is when I am frustrated that I don't notice the horrible things I am teaching my children.

It's Never Your Fault.

They fall and get an owie and we say, "Oh that mean old table.” Why not "Hey, watch your head when you crawl under the dinner table"? Wouldn't that be better advice, and help them avoid another head-table collision in the future?

You Always Get To Choose.

We do this a million times a day. Red cup or blue cup? Pink pajamas or purple pajamas? Crackers or pretzels? Juice or milk? Up or down? The Alphabet Song or The Itsy Bitsy Spider Song? Markers or crayons? We're trying to be nice. We like watching their little decision-making mechanism at work.

We think it's cute, but we end up  creating a whole lot of unnecessary confusion for our children, hassle for ourselves, and in the end a child who expects that, always, in every situation, he gets to make a choice.

Real life, of course, is full of choices but also full of situations in which there are no options. Pain, hurt, injury, Speedos, work, loneliness, heartburn, hardship, grief, traffic, betrayal, bad hair days, rain, nosy neighbors, PMS, aging, IRS, taxes, polyester, death: you can avoid some, but you certainly can't avoid all. The only choice that always exists is the choice of how we respond.

We would bless our children to teach them the art and skill of choosing happiness no matter what, choosing acceptance when there is no other option, choosing gratitude... Those are good choices to know how to make. Choosing red or blue never really helped anyone, even when it comes down to politics.

Life Is Fair.

Everyone gets equal portions of cake passed out on equally pretty plates. Siblings endure the same bedtime even when the age differs significantly. We count to make sure they all have the same number of presents, within the same price range, the same opportunities, experiences, advantages, and on and on. I don't need to point out why this is a stupid move.

Anyone who has experienced life beyond the cradle knows it isn't fair. That we long for justice, that we feel justice should prevail, is true. This is why we love movies with a clear-cut hero and villain and you-know-who gets what's coming to him in the end. Rah rah rah for truth, justice, and the American way! We have ideals, but we also have reality.

Everybody gets hangnails and indigestion, not just the bad guys. Sometimes the nicest people have the crummiest lives. Sometimes the hardest workers end up the poorest. Why we feel like we should coddle our children into thinking otherwise is beyond me. Of course, it's nice to be even and equal, and it's nice that we can smooth some things out for kids, but we parents make a career of it.

Right and Wrong Are Relative.

We daily, hourly instill in them a principle of morals by preference: if it feels good (at the time) then it's right, if it feels otherwise then it's wrong. It's by our own failure to be consistent with discipline – for ourselves and for them - that we pound this into their little brains. No wonder they wind up confused about God, truth, right, wrong, professional sports, and Santa Claus.

The good news is that love covers a multitude of sin. It is our own sin that needs covering, when it comes to being a parent. “We're not ready for a baby yet,” I've heard young couples say. Heavens no. They're not ready. No one ever is.

How can you be ready to be a perfect moral example, to wear spit-up like a badge of honor, to second-guess every truth you've ever known, to realize that your failures directly influence your child, to give up sleep, sex, sanity, selfishness? You're never ready; you just go into it blind and deaf and mute and come out of it seeing and hearing and singing (sometimes yelling). Parenting is the strangest thing a person can ever do. I highly recommend it.

Images courtesy of octavioags,  minotaurus, David Knox, felly1000. Quote from The Training of Children in the Christian Family, by Luthur Allan Weigle, p. 14.

There he stood, my little 1 1/2 year old, with his blond curls on his head and his diaper in his hand. As in, not on his little bottom. And yes, there was poop. And it was Not Good.

I was writing about happiness. I had stopped writing about happiness just to go get that little booger up from his nap. I was needing a break from the sort of thing I kept finding in my research on happiness. Things like this:

Happiness is..."the ultimate state of conscious feeling where all the five senses integrate into a purest form of dreamless love. Happiness flows out of 'FORGIVE'ness and not 'FORGET'ness," says Asesh Datta here.

This is why happiness is so elusive; we've just defined the heart and soul out of it.

How in the name of all that is yellow and buttery are you supposed to make all five senses integrate into a purest form of dreamless love?

First of all, what is dreamless love? Is love normally full of dreams? Is it better without the dreams? How do you get it to be dreamless? How can you tell? Can you be happy with love that stubbornly retains one or two dreams involving giant French fries, a purple tuxedo, and a burro named Roxy?

And how do you integrate all five senses into this sort of state? Let's just refresh on all five senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. Please explain to me how you can smell dreamless love. Please. I want to know.

Anybody?

By now you're thinking Okay, ha ha ha with the sarcasm, where is the happiness?

Well, it's elusive, like a deer, so quit being so pushy.

I take that back. Happiness isn't elusive. Happiness is hard work. We pretend it's elusive so we don't have to fess up to being lazy. That way we can continue to be unhappy without feeling like it's our own fault, which allows us to continue complaining about the utter injustice of the universe and how we're gonna tell that Happiness Guru a thing or two when we get up there. Or over there. Or through there. Whatever.

Happiness isn't elusive, like a deer. Happiness is big and ugly, like a rhino. Happiness likes stare-downs. Happiness needs plenty of space and care and feeding. Happiness makes great big piles of poop.

Uh, my analogy might have broken down on that last one.

And now I have a story to tell. I finished the line above (the one about the rhino poop, you remember?), and went to wake up my napping children. Well. They weren't exactly napping anymore. They had been awake for an undisclosed amount of time as I recorded my brilliant and vanishing insights into your happiness. That is the price they pay for having a famous authoress a writer as a mother.

I opened the door to my daughter's room. I opened the door to my son's room. I smelled rhinos. Well, I smelled something I now unfailingly associate with rhinos.

Those are the little ironies of life. You get up from writing about happiness and walk in to wake your wonderful, cuddly, cute baby only to find yourself scraping poo off the floor, which was put there by said baby, whom you are currently not referring to as "wonderful" or "cute" and very definitely not "cuddly." Half a roll of paper towels and a bottle of disinfectant later, your happiness is being put to the test. And this is the essay question that stumps you at the end:

Can you be happy while you are cleaning up poo?

I will now defer to my collection of quotations from people much smarter than me:

Abraham Lincoln, who certainly knew a thing or two about cleaning up gigantic messes, said that "Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."

Benjamin Franklin said that "It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man," so according to the illustrious Mr. Franklin, me cleaning poo off the floor is a happier person than me sitting around idly in that cushy blue chair, reading a novel and nibbling pistachios. I don't know. I've always admired B.F. but he seems to be falling a little short of insightful on this one.

Here's what I think: happiness doesn't come when you have more fun; fun comes when you have more happiness.

We wait for certain conditions and expect them to provide happiness and we're always disappointed. Reality can never live up to fantasy. Disney World is fun when you're there, but it's never quite as good as it was in those hours of imagining how great it would be to go to Disney World.

You don't imagine standing in line for an hour, melting into a pool of sweat in the shiny asphalt, and wearing a scratchy polyester jumpsuit as a fill-in for Captain Kirk in the make-your-own Star Trek movie event. So you go, you have fun, but it's not as good as the expectation. Too often we let that gap between what we get and what we expect just destroy our happiness.

I didn't expect poo on the bed when I walked into my son's room, but that's what I got. And there was my moment of destiny in the pursuit of happiness: do I curse and mutter? Do I let it ruin my day? Do I yell at my child?

I'm basically a selfish person, and I'd rather be happy than be unhappy. So I stopped and looked and then I laughed. Because, really, what else can you do?

I laughed because it's a great story. I laughed as I took the sheets of the bed, bathed the child, and mopped the floor. (Okay, I might have stopped laughing at some point because you can't just laugh indefinitely; bear with me, I'm trying to make a point.) Here's the point: Happy is up to you. Happy doesn't make the mess go away, but it does make cleaning up any kind of mess better.

Oh, and yeah, I also laughed because it's not as great a story as my friend's, whose daughter not only took off her diaper and pooped but then proceeded to wipe it all over the walls. Comparison isn't always a bad thing.

Images courtesy of mpeterke and lanuiop.

I keep waiting to feel motivated, energetic, high on possibility so I can get going. But it's going to be action that creates motivation, not the other way around. My actions today will create my life for all the tomorrows.
(I keep repeating motivational phrases like that to myself but that's not really working either.)

Zeke is sleeping rather well at night; he usually gets a last feeding at 9 or 10, when I go to bed, and then wakes up once around 1 and again around 4.  I'm hopeful we can work our way past needing that 1 a.m. feeding pretty quickly. It's kind of an unpleasant interruption in the middle of dreams, and it cuts the sleep really short, especially if I don't go to sleep right after I feed him at 9 or 10. Which I hardly ever do...

I'm so much more relaxed with him, far more than with Mara and even more than with Robbie as a newborn. I'm not sure what the difference is. Maybe letting go of some perfectionism. Maybe trusting myself as a mother more. It helps to look at Mara and Robbie and think, "Hmm, they're happy. They're healthy. They're relatively well-behaved. We must be doing okay."

Actually what I'm struggling most with is staying consistent with Mara and Robbie while caring for Zeke. Since they are relatively well-behaved most of the time, I tend to just let little things slide. But then those little things become habitual behaviors, and I know they're not good. How do you stay consistent and motivated when it's not a BIG deal?

Yesterday I could hardly get Robbie to come when I called him, and he was crying (his version of pitching a fit) every time I told him no on anything. We were with my sister-in-law and niece at her house, then out at MacDonald's - it wasn't really the time for a training session. But obviously I've been letting some things go over the last few days if he feels comfortable with ignoring my commands. How do I see that coming? How do I keep myself consistent with him?

Perhaps I will put a Post-It on his forehead today, saying something like, "Hey, Mom, PAY ATTENTION!"

Ideas? Help?

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I have an almost three year old (Mara) and a fifteen month old (Wick). They share a lot of toys, such as blocks, cars and trucks, and stuffed animals, but some toys Mars have lots of little pieces and aren't good for Wick. So I bought a bunch of $1 plastic shoeboxes and separated her "big girl" toys out. She can open the lids, but Wick can't quite figure out how. Now she can big out the box she wants to play with, and she knows that she plays with the toys in the boxes up on the table, not on the floor. She has to put one box away before she gets another out, so it also helps me not end up with a million tiny toys scattered all over the house.

Cookbook Give Away!

Win Rachael Ray's Big Orange Book, her biggest collection yet. It includes over 300 pages of 30-minute meals, dinners for one, kosher meals, vegetarian meals, appetizers, and holiday meals. Click on the image at right to go to the Give Away. All you have to do is leave a comment! Drawing on Friday, Feb. 27!

Running errands with one small child requires some forethought. You need diapers, wipes, a stroller, a car seat, bottle-feeding gear if you're not breastfeeding. Once you get past the nursing stage, you need food, a spoon, a bib, more wipes. Lots of wipes.

Running errands with two small children requires a degree of insanity. Fortunately, I have reached this level and somewhat beyond, so I don't let have two kids under two slow me down, even when it should. Read the rest of this entry »