Parenting
I loved writing my little advice column for me and myself when I was in my 20’s and single and I absolutely LOVED all your responses!! Go read the comments!! Then tonight I got to thinking about what it’s like up here in the mid-thirties, married, with kids. My oldest featuring a tee from his favorite CD: Cake for Dinner. Despite being fraught presently with the blur that double pink eye can bestow to moms dropping eye drops in the moving target of kids’ pupils, I am cogent enough to look around and see my insecurities in this state of life that looks all well-assembled from the outside. I have a loving and hardworking husband. Bonus points that he’s handsome. I have three cute kids. Cute when they’re not ripping each other’s lego creations apart. I have this fancy old house, oh, and I used to practice law so somehow that means I’m smart (except my house is very dusty as is my brain). The insecurities in our married, kidded 30’s are very real, even if not apparent to the naked eye. On a daily basis, my brain twirls through these first-world problems: 1) Did I explain that properly to my kid or am I completely bluffing my way through parenting? First born kids get all the practice hits, right? (baseball analogy, really? wow, mothering a baseball fanatic has changed me.) If I don’t show compassion and exhibit love constantly, will my children feel unloved and under cared for? Are my…
Read More
Yes! I’m expecting number four around Christmas and YES! we hoped for this baby and yes, I will probably throw up for 8 months straight as has been the norm with the other three. I feel like I’m in a thin place, a place of between ness. My joy is along side the suffering I’ve witnessed and experienced in our friends and family this past year: struggling to conceive, or to find a partner they want to conceive with, or to hold their live baby in their arms, or to hold their live toddler in their arms. I’ve wept with the people I love, crying out why why why take this love from our midst? Why deprive us of this potential for joy? This delight? And now, why do I get to easily conceive another baby, a fourth? Part of me wanted to wait even longer to stop using NFP to abstain from sex during my fertile times. Part of me wanted to hold out from going through my usual physically challenging pregnancies, and after my last recovery that took a full year to function normally again, that too. Part of me didn’t want to get pregnant to have to maybe lose my baby. To have to say goodbye, as my friends had. The other part of me listened to my dear friend Laura’s pain and insane hurt and decided that I, too, could find hope in a new life for our family. If Laura can find hope in her daughters’ deaths,…
Read More
I got married at 26. I don’t have the experience to speak to a single lady who’s hoping to find the love of her life in her thirties, forties, fifties, or beyond because I didn’t live it. Attempting authenticity here, people. Stick with me. This is me, sneak eating an ice cream bar while my husband watches the kids. A super-sweet blog reader who is in her early twenties emailed me and asked for forward-looking advice. She’s clever, virtuous, and doing all the hard work of living authentically and developing her best self. I emailed her this (perhaps) shocking list of things I would tell a lady in her position to ponder on, looking ahead to being as prepared as one may be for marriage and kids. Unsolicited advice to the rest of you! Eat it up! I didn’t do all of these things, but some, and others I watched my friends endure. 1) Do lots of things you want to do, things that are on your heart. Travel, career, buy nice boots, color your hair, spent an entire month eating dark chocolate every day, whatever. You give up a hunk of your autonomy to your husband, and then the rest is shredded by small kids 😉 I joke a little, but truly. Don’t put off anything you feel called to spend money and time on, because those decisions will no longer be your own. 2) Pray specifically for a spouse who can handle your sh*t. That’s a crude way to…
Read More
My five year old (almost six) has been asking the big questions that little kids ask. And I’m sorting through what the answers are. Often I have to preface my response with: Let me think about that one. His latest: What is God’s plan for my life and how will I know what it is? And I choked on my milk and took two deep breaths because this feels so above my pay grade. And then I remember that this is my pay grade and these are the questions I have to hold in my heart for the kids. These are what I’m here for. (And to be pooped on. LOTS.) I started out with: God has a plan for all our lives, and we don’t know what that plan is, but it will unfold over time. Then I went towards: God doesn’t shout down from Heaven, parting the clouds, to tell you exactly what you should do. (Eliciting giggles and chortles.) I explained that we make lots of little choices and those little choices lead us to bigger choices. And that as we choose, always putting kindness and love first, we get stronger and stronger inside. That’s our conscience. That helps us know if what we’re doing is right or wrong. He wanted particulars. What if God wants me to be a soldier or a doctor? I want to be a baseball player. Now it was my turn to laugh a little. I shared my view that God isn’t going to…
Read More
I love sharing a birthday with my daughter!! She’s four and I’m thirty three. How’s that for fun? We had a little family brunch this morning after some swift maneuverings in the kitchen with my sister & her spouse making pancakes with the batter that had been waiting patiently for me to finish sixty other things, my mom on her (sprained!) ankle watching the little kids, my husband and oldest at mass, and twirling and whirling but it was delish & so much fun to all be together. My wonderful aunt came over too, and with both my sisters who live in town, one’s spouse, my parents, and our little family, it was the perfect birthday. I only wish all my siblings and their kids could be in town (but, of course, that’s like, all the time I want that!!). I went off the Smitten Kitchen birthday cake recipe. It was relish. My dad was kind enough to take the cakes out of the oven for us while we had girl time at the early mass, so one of them met with a spatula that didn’t like it and kinda was beat up. Frosting to the rescue! Butter + powdered sugar + fruit meant one layer was bluish and one was pink! Quiche was my fav go-to recipe. Crust from the food coop, bake blind partially, toss your ingredients, cover with 1 1/3 cup milk + four eggs + nutmeg + pepper + salt = 40 minutes and it’s amazingly…
Read More
I grew up with three sisters and a younger brother. I’m the fourth of five. The baby girl. Accustomed to never getting my way as a child, but interested in everything my sisters did (curling hair? wearing glasses! doing homework! listening to the Indigo Girls? yes, yes, yes, yes). Somehow I always assumed we’d have tons of girls and *maybe* a boy in there. The ultrasound tech telling us that the baby was a BOY at 20 weeks with our oldest made me kinda faint inside. Boys equal noise, no snuggling, video games, rough housing, and running away from their moms. That’s what I thought. And my brother is a great guy, so I don’t even know where I came up with these ideas about little boys. I was terrified. Now I watch my daughter, almost four!, sandwiched between her brothers and I can’t imagine it any other way for her. Yes, she can throw an elbow or erupt with a screeching growl like none other. Literally, her throat makes noises that could scare a wild boar. But she likes it this way. She does long for a sister “a baby one she can hold all the time,” but she loves her boys. So much for how we think our children will be, or how our lives will go. We really don’t know, do we? And that’s truly part of the beauty of it. I can control so much (and so little) of my life. Who my kids are and…
Read More