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In today’s world, I don’t think we can over emphasize the importance of dads. I am grateful for the father that Dave has become. Being an only child, he was not expecting to be a dad (and a stand-in dad) to five children. But yet I watch as he hands the Alan Wrench to 2-year-old Emme to help fix the wobbly table, as he says “NO WAY’ to skirts too short for our teenagers, wrestles with martial arts intensity with Ty, and empties the dishwasher every morning – the job that is the most hated in our household. He doesn’t understand periods, or nail polish, or how one girl can get to 15,000 texts in one month… but he still sits by in a sea of 11 years olds and exclaims, “that is sooooooooooo cute” as Lily opens all her birthday gifts and gives “how to get out of a goodnight kiss” advice to Jade on her first date (which wasn’t really a date, she says). He raps in public. He listens to Justin Bieber. He is actually giddy that Jade will be taking chemistry next year. He is the first to hold a crying girl when the emotions are just too much (and we have a lot, and I do mean A LOT of emotions in this house!). He dodges blaster fire from 6 year old boys. He builds inventions with Ty. He changes poopie diapers. He handles bath and bedtimes every single night. He has learned to make pasta, quesadillas, and a killer grilled cheese sandwich. And he never yells at the kids. Ever.
Oh, and have I mentioned that he has amazing biceps?
I look at the men in our neighborhood, my friends’ husbands who coach their kids’ teams, host bbqs, show up to school open houses, cook dinners, stay home with the kids so their wife can go to work, stay home with the kids so the women can go away for a whole. entire. 24. hours. And I am blown away. We ask them the do all this (and so much more!) and also to be proficient at careers, providing some, most, or all of the income for their families. These men not only take it all on, but they do it pretty darn well…considering that they are not women.
There are days when I think I could simply get by without a man in my life. I mean, who needs another freakin day of tripping over those giant shoes in my kitchen. Or of explaining that cream cheese does not go in the freezer. Or of sharing a bathroom with someone with that much hair.
But I get over it.
So, today I celebrate the dads I know: Dave, Steve, Jim, both Ryans, Ben, Tom, Darin, Mike, Jonathan, and all the others that have turned Father’s Day into something to really celebrate.
Happy Father’s Day!
Last night Dave and I watched as Emme — 22 months — tried to put on her own shirt.
As cute as it was, it was a frustrating experience for ALL of us. Mainly because Emme kept trying to stick her head in the neck hole first, rather than go up through the big waist part of the shirt. I can see her point. She was thinking, this is where my head goes. But it doesn’t work that way. And she kept trying and trying and failing and failing.
And, she would not let us help her. Every time I reached over and tried to just show her the right way — she furrowed her brow (a trait she inherited from her father….) and frowned, jerked the shirt away, and continued to try to put her head in the wrong way. So, I sat on my hands. Finally, even Dave couldn’t take it anymore and he tried to just SHOW her the way to be successful and she actually shoved him away and said, NO ( a trait she inherited from her mother!)!
So, we both sat on our hands.
And as I sat there and watched her it struck me that we were experiencing a microcosm of parenting that we would face for the rest of our lives. It is nearly torture to watch your child try their best and fail — especially when you know… YOU KNOW… how to help them, how to reach over, turn the shirt around and just hand it back to them so they can do it! You are not trying to take over, just help, for the love of God! But she insisted on doing it herself…wrong.
And that is what we get to do over and over. We watch our kids try and refuse our help and fail. They insist that they know better than us — or that they can do it themselves — or that they don’t need us. And we have so sit there saying, “Please let me help you, I can’t stand to watch this!” But they GET to do it themselves. We GET to wait, watch, pray, and lose sleep.
Finally, Emme solved the problem. She switched to a different shirt. One that buttoned up the front. She put it on and then… and then…. asked Daddy to button up the front.
Thank God.
There is just something about your last baby.
But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after–oh, that’s love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she’s gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She’s the one you can’t put down.” Barbara Kingsolver from The Poisonwood Bible
I just can’t put Emme down — even when she squirms out of my arms, I am still holding her close. Maybe it is because I know what is coming — namely the hormones of a 9th grader, which I would not wish on anyone. But mostly I think I just know in my heart how fast it all goes, how even when I try to hold on to every single detail of what she looks like and what she says, that so much of it gets lost. And so each afternoon when I rock her to sleep for her nap, I put away the to-do list that threatens to rattle in my mind, and I stare into her eyes. I whisper promises of ever-lasting love. I hold her and try to memorize what it feels like to nestle her in my arms. To remember what it feels like to cuddle someone who oozes joy. And I am so thankful that at 21 months she is still so much of a baby. She only has a few words and talks in her baby babble most of the time. He hair is a mop that has never been cut, in some sort of flip, feathered, girl-mullet… and I love it. I don’t want to cut the hair that has always been there. Maybe for her 2nd birthday, but not. just. yet. I love that her kisses are outloud, spoken “mmmmmmmmmwaaahhhs” and her cheeks and legs are chubby and delicious. She can point to her nose, her ears, her belly button, and her arm pits. And will stick out her tongue on cue. I want to bathe in her cuteness, letting it flow over me with the profound love that a mother has for her child.
There will be time for hair and shoes and fashion and lots of talk…probably on the phone to, gulp, boys. There will be time to get her that cell phone or the latest music player or whatever it will be in 13 years that she “must have.” Dave and I laughed last night that by the time Emme is in high school (and the other four kids are out of the house), she will have a phone in her room and her own number and a TV and a computer and a lock on her bedroom door and probably no curfew. That we’ll text her to come down the hall to have dinner with her aging parents. And maybe that is how it will be when she is a teenager. But more than likely I will want to sneak in at night and climb into bed with her and watch her, hoping that she will sleep through the antics of her crazy mother whose heart aches a bit.
For she is the last one.
Happy Anniversary to Me! It was one year ago today that I launced my first post here on MamaBloo. 298 people visited my blog that day!!! Since that first post, MamaBloo has published 129 more posts on this blog and received over 425 comments. MamaBloo has had over 17,300 page views and those views come from all 6 continents. But not Antartica. No penguins here.
But more than the numbers, this past year has been one of exploration for me. One that first day when I went “out there” and live with my blog, I have placed a part of myself in my reader’s hands. It was not easy for me to open myself up through my craft — to expose my writing and my life to anyone and everyone. I have struggled with what it means to talk about kids on a public forum — to put their names nad faces out into the world for anyone to see (some may say that once we appeared on national TV the horse was outta the barn on that one!!). I have to face my own inner demons of what kind of approval I have needed from my own readership, soaking up comments like a comment-glutton. I have studied Google Analytics (which tells one how many people are visiting one’s blog) and I have also walked away from statistics and fasted for months — not knowing if anyone anywhere ever read a word I was writing — and contemplating whether or not that was even important. I have been pursued by advetisers, product reviews, even other bloggers, to put up posts about what they want.
But a year ago blogging wasn’t really an option. I mean, I had to start this blog. I was bursting to write, to document my family, to put my thoughts “out there.” I knew that starting a blog was a MUST the day Dave decided to perform a dubious (at best) home surgery. A few years back we discovered that much like Chandler on the show Friends it seemed that Dave had grown, well, a third nipple. He liked to call it his “love bump.” So, one day he got tired of it and asked the family at the dinner table, “Who would like to cut off my love bump??” The look on my face communicated, what kind of freakin question is that to ask of these lovely, genteel children? But, I was wrong. Lily (age 7 at the time) was all for it. So, the two of them grabbed the fingernail clippers and scurried down the hall to the bathroom, where all home-surgeries are performed. The rest of us hid under a blanket. I then knew that I needed a blog.
But more than the personal rewards that come with writing, it has been a good discipline for me to write regularly. Some weeks I have to force myself to sit down and try to come up with something to say. Some weeks stories just burst out of me. I have had to be very open to the process of creation through writing. And that process has opened me up to myself.
But now it is more of an option. I sit here tonight wrestling with where to go from here. I feel pulled to both keep the blog going and to stop and take a break. I honestly cannot say which is right for me. I keep looking for a sign to tell me where to go. When I was younger, I used to ask God for signs that went something like this, God if you want me to do this thing, make a blue bird land on my windowsill in the next 10 seconds. Yeah, seriously. I can picture God listening to me and saying, “Yeah, seriously? I am not a performing pony. But I like your creativity.” The blue bird never seemed to come and I have learned since that “signs” do not usually come on demand. Instead they require an atuned ear to the universe that is sometimes hard to muster inbetween diaper changes, band concerts, dinners, clean ups, and sore feet. But I do trust that the path will be revealed.
But no matter what happens, on this lovely first birthday slash anniversary, I want to say THANK YOU to all my readers. Your comments have meant so much. You subscriptions have meant so much. Just knowing that there are people “out there” reading my words has meant so much. Truly. Each reader has been a blessing to me in his or her own way. I really have such a great group of readers — some of you I knew before, some of you I have met since I started this journey. You have all treated me with kindness and honestly, and I love you all.
So, here’s to all of YOU! The thousands of you who have shared this last year with me. Thank you and Cheers!!!!
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