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She never ceases to shower her children with unending, personalized attention without fatigue or Jim Weiss. They engaged all day long with things like a detailed painting project wherein the child ne’er slides their paintbrush OVER ALL THE FURNITURE IN SIGHT whilst the mother is rummaging through the pantry after the toddler discovered the grandmother’s green food dye and now everything on lower shelves has to be moved. She never shrieks at them to please LEAVE HER ALONE at the swimming pool changing areas, only to emerge and discover the two older had strewn their clothing, wet and dry alike, all over the changing room. All the whilst she was not struggling to get her wet clam-like suit off over her not untanned, unwaxed legs. Whilst she had been getting into said swimming suit, her daughter had asked her “is it supposed to be so tight?” 😐 She never escapes to her sewing studio, and certainly would never perform 90’s dance moves (alone, upper body only) to Uptown Funk (at a volume of 10 out of 5) because her husband is home and she would never need to have a loud longer term break from her darlings. She never prays for silence inside her own never ending mind list real. She never cries in the bathroom on the phone to her mother over literally nothing. She never ever would think of complaining to her girlfriends (because her friends are lady friends) about her fill-in-the-blank. And most importantly, this mother would never…
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We ate like royalty on our vacation. As promised, a run down. The kids ate everything! The marathon-training-husband needed lots of calories so we ate and ate and ate. It was so easy to cook and clean up with another adult around to play and be with the kids. Rocket science, right? When I devised our grocery list before going on the trip, I wanted foods that could do double duty and that I knew the kids would eat. They’re good eaters and eat just about everything we do so that wasn’t too terrible. When in doubt, oatmeal and yogurt and blueberries, right? I had to fuel up with chai every day because the baby took to sleeping like a newborn, literally. He had been sleeping through the night for over a month and night weaned. #regression. Ground turkey, organic pasta, chopped carrots, basil (ended up doing a lemon juice//sour cream//greek yogurt//diced garlic sauce). Mixed greens, pear, peach, salted & roasted sunflower seeds with a homemade vinaigrette. Mixed greens with hard boiled eggs, avocado, dried cherries, and pistachios with a homemade french dressing. Ground turkey, black beans, white rice, flour tortilla, topped with avocado, garden heirloom tomatoes, shredded colby, and a dollop of sour cream. All pork hot dogs, the avocado salad, my new fav dill cabbage dish, corn chips, and CORN on the cob! Snack: hardboiled eggs, garden fresh tomatoes, cottage cheese, and pepper. Big roasted chicken that still had a toe nail, much to the kids’ delight and…
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I can’t actually throw any towels in because they’re almost all in the laundry pile. In the basement. In the basement whose carpeting is about to be ripped out because MOLD {delights of Monday discoveries} where the leaking dishwasher led to a partially ripped out ceiling that promptly shed small nails that went into my husband’s foot. The piles of laundry are slow going because I simply cannot haul the tot down there with me to change it over because of ^^conditions and the only place I can safely corral him is his crib on the second floor of the house but that needs to be lowered like yesterday because it’s on the middle rung and I think he’s going to catapult himself over the railing if I leave him in there to cry for as long as it would take to hoof it to the basement, sort and insert laundry, and make it back up. Hey, I wasn’t a sprinter in 10th grade track. I was a sad-sorry-hurdler-that-was-really-mediocre <–that’s being kind to the ghost of runner’s past. This morning AA stayed home through breakfast. Hold it. He has run every single morning for 4 months in prep for the Twin Cities marathon! Mostly this means he is living on a runner’s high and I’m reaping all the benefits of the runner’s wife {happy husband!! happy husband!! did I say happy??}. The only tiny downside is that some mornings {almost every} the tot will awaken right after AA leaves circa…
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We had never taken a family vacation with all three kids before this summer. A vacation with just our family of five. Not to visit family or friends. Not for a wedding. Not for a baptism. Just away. Just us. And clearly now I know what we were missing. We spent almost five days at our place in Wisconsin and could have stayed a million years. My mom has outfitted it with all the books and games of our childhood, and even though we go almost weekly for a day trip, this was our first time simply immersing ourselves in its over 100 acres of beauty with all three kids. No agenda. No schedules. No obligations. Just us. We picked apples from an ancient apple tree and made a crisp. We hiked on the trails and waded in the creek. We scouted on the location of a future tree house//fort. RIGHT UP THERE. What a tree! The beach in front of the tree doesn’t look too shabby, either. Lots of rocks to splunk. We read so many books. So so so many and many more. Everyday had a cadence of reading, playing cards, playing outside, snacks, meals, naps, AA going for his marathon training run, and me sewing. Everyday had its fair share of screaming and fighting but with no agenda and a relaxed day, that was much less than I had anticipated. When you two oldest can play UNO together: sudden and constant entertainment. One morning it was chilly…
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Before I had kids, I thought bribing your child to do something was akin to derelict parenting. In fact, I thought it was derelict parenting. I thought children should be treated like mini-adults, such that once they hit about 4 years old, they would understand the causal relationship between action & consequence and sorry, pal, you blew it, try again, would work. Bribing them with baseball cards, ice cream, trips to the train store, opportunities to get out of bed earlier and go to bed later, I mean, who would do such things? ME! ME! I used to say, Don’t do this or that or you won’t get this or that. And then I’d have to make good on my threats. And it always felt like a threat. I do bribes with glee, but threats–I end up feeling like a curmudgeon. And then have to constantly dole out a unique or (worse) oft-repeated punishment when they inevitably do not listen and obey. But beyond just saying it aloud (which goes in one adorable ear and out the awful one), I’ve finally landed on a tried & true method of pure incentivizing that actually works and has durability. It has lasted over a month. The subjective and indiscriminate point system. Here’s how it works: They start out at zero. The five year old has to hit 15 before the promised action//gift//treat. The three year old has to hit 10. And anything and everything can give and taketh away points. You hit your…
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While talking to a dear girlfriend from childhood the other day, the topic of how we teach our kids about the faith came up. Beyond meal prayer, night prayer, and weekly mass. How do we discuss and teach our faith while wiping bottoms, thawing food for dinner, picking up toys, maybe working on alphabets & reading, and calming fervored tantrums? I went to a state university and when I landed at the Catholic law school where I met my former-seminarian husband, I hadn’t been at Catholic school since the sixth grade. The task of being Catholic in the home had initially seemed like a specific subject to teach. Like table manners. Or reading. But as my kids grow, and their love and understanding of our faith grows, it is actually way simpler than I thought. If the environment is rich with culturally Catholic items, the kids kinda do it via osmosis. We do it like this. 1) Sacramentals. We are crawling with saints medals, holy cards, candles, rosaries, crucifixes, icons, incense, you name it. Holy water fonts in bedrooms, holy water to sprizzzle all around the house, and a few precious relics of saints. All those little physical reminders of our faith–many of them blessed. Just seeing them around the house and playing with (some) of them ignites the kids’ cultural Catholicism. Crucifixes like this one the baby got from his amazing Godparents are a beautiful reminder when I’m telling SuperBoy about how Jesus really suffered so put your sister touching your legos…
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