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!

©2012 MamaBloo. All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2012 MamaBloo. All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2012 MamaBloo. All Rights Reserved.

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!!!!

©2012 MamaBloo. All Rights Reserved.

But that didn’t sit well with us at all.  So, we cheated.  We went out for drinks one night at this wonderful place right on Puget Sound (Ray’s Boathouse Cafe for those of you in the area).  And as the sun was setting over the water we were able to hold up the sealed envelope and read what we had been awarded.  I didn’t like what I found.  Probably because I am a cheater.

I was awarded “Most Effecient.”  Seriously? That is about as sexy as a lump of coal.  Especially in light of the fact that the man whom I would later marry was awarded “Most Charismatic.”  Bah humbug.  Efficient.    Hey there, if you need something accomplished with a minimum of effort?  With the fewest possible resources consumed? In a well-organized way?  CALL ME…here is my number.  Like I said, sexy as coal.

But it wasn’t long until I decided to embrace my efficiency.  I think I came to realize that others saw something in me that I had yet to see in myself.  When I was growing up I would loathe it when I was carrying groceries in from the car and my mom would say, “you may need to take two trips…”  Uh, no, I do not take two trips, I would think to myself and shake my head at the ridiculous nature of that suggestion. Two trips? Whatever. Instead, I would load up 7 bags on each arm, creating red welts in my skin.  But I only took one trip.  So, maybe I did deserve the award.

Nowadays my efficiency looks more like getting all 7 of us to a location on time and with the required equipment.  It means buying Christmas gifts in February.  It means figuring out the fastest driving route to any location I may need to visit.  Afterall, I only have so much energy and so I must use it very wisely.

My gift has grown with me, one could argue.

So, today I took it one step farther.  I received a special notice in the mail from our local energy utility.  They wrote me to inform me that I am WAY more efficient than my most efficient neighbors.  I got two – count them — two smiley faces and was awarded the title of GREAT at being energy efficient.  That my most efficient neighbors consume 1,593 something-rathers and my household of SEVEN only consumes 1,163.  And I am even more energy efficient than I was last year.

Snap.  Take that.  No one who was awarded “Most Charismatic” ever got a letter from Puget Sound Energy.

Look who is sexy now….

Oh, and turn off your lights, why don’t ya?

©2012 MamaBloo. All Rights Reserved.

It goes like this.  Izzy knocks over her milk and it spills everywhere and someone announces, “Izzy is THE SPILLER tonight!!!”  She smiles.  Ah shucks.  I get to be THE SPILLER ?  Cool.

We spill so much around here that also have an expression that immediately  follows any spill.  The glass goes over, water goes everywhere and I shout, “Mobilize the Spill-Unit!!!”  Upon this command,  Jade runs for paper towels, Izzy grabs plates and other gear out of harms way, Lily grabs napkins and goes low — mopping up the drips that are already hitting the floor, and Ty… well, we are working on him.  Usually he helps Jade.  I coordinate.  In this fashion we get spills cleaned up and everything back in order in less than 90 seconds and dinner continues.  We are a well-oiled machine.

Except for the time that Lily overwhelmed the Spill-Unit with FOUR back to back spills.  No sooner had everything been put right when.. bloooppp… over went another glass.  She spilled Jade’s milk, Ty’s milk and her own milk…twice.  It was epic.  We still talk about it when the conversation lags.  Hey, remember that ONE TIME when Lily was like the Spiller-Extraordinaire?    Oh yeah, we all say, that was epic!  Then we sort of chuckle.  But the chuckling doesn’t last because another spill is iminent and we have to be ready, on our guard for possible spill-unit mobilization.

Usually the SPILLER is Izzy.  That girl could enter the Olympics if they had a SPILLER event and bring home the gold. 

Last night Ty was the spiller.

The night before it was me.  Like I said.  It is an epidemic.

—————————-

Click here to see Emme and me during a Me Ra Koh photo shoot (last November) for her upcoming book!!!

©2012 MamaBloo. All Rights Reserved.

It is the day we FALL back.  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh….. bring on that extra hour of sleep.  I have said before how I feel about Springing ahead, but Falling back?  Oh, that day makes all 364 other days worth it.  I love going to bed Saturday night around 11pm and setting the clock back an hour.  “Oh…is it only 10? ” and I snuggle in all proud of myself for going to bed early.

There was a time several years ago after Dave and I were first married where he woke me up early on Fall Back Day for some god-foresaken reason.  I remember my incredulous reaction as I said to him, “You just RUINED my favorite day of the year!!!”  Now, when you first get married there is a lot to learn about each other.  But I will never forget the look on Dave’s face when he said, “THIS is your FAVORITE day of the year?  Seriously?”  Yes, dude, seriously.  It is to his credit that he has never forgotten the lesson he learned that day. 

To be fair, I could go without the dark mornings.  There is something so sinister and depressing about waking up in the pitch dark. And it does signal the beginning of winter.  Which means that  around here we are headed for 6 months of solid rain.  Rain.  Every single day.  Except when it snows.  And then the whole area shuts down.  Oh, I mean it.  Those of you out there in regions where you get snow on a regular basis would be stunned at the Seattle area’s lack of snow savvy.  People start to freak out. Two years ago, the schools shut down because there was a THREAT of snow. When it snows around here people don’t go to work and they call their friends and family to be sure they are surviving.  We even have our own local  reporter who loves to coin terms like “Storm Blast 2009.”  He is usually in a hat, coat, and gloves standing on top of the Space Needle while the snow flurries around him and he — get this — HOLDS ON so as not to be blown away, I guess.  Then he tells us to expect 3 inches of snow and to BEWARE of STORM BLAST 2009!!!!!   Then the one snow plow that is owned by King County starts to work its way around the area.  Cars pull to the side of the road and are abandoned as people claim, “I cannot drive in this stuff! Too dangerous!”  (And, hec, I say pull over if you think three inches of snow is too dangerous.)  When snow is predicted the stores RUN OUT of bottled water as people prepare for the worst.   I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not.

Now, RAIN we can handle around here – we don’t cancel anything for rain.  But SNOW?  Nope, we don’t do snow.

So, here I am today, all rested from my extra hour of sleep and ready to face Storm Blast 2010.

©2012 MamaBloo. All Rights Reserved.

In a lot of cultures and religions there are rites of passage that mark the passing from childhood to adulthood — the bar mitzva, the quinceanera, etc.  But the it seems like this ritual is missing from so many of our lives.   Especially for girls.

Enter the 13.

This idea was thought up by a friend of a friend and a former co-youth leader of mine that noticed this deficit and decided to do something about it.  It goes like this.  When a girls turns 13, she gets a party.  But not a party full of other teens brimming with emotions and hormones.  A party full of adult women.  Women who will say to her:  you are valued,  we are with you, we love you.   Think The Red Tent but in the suburbs. 

So, last weekend was Izzy’s 13.  She had been looking forward to this weekend away since her big sister turned 13 a year and a half ago. 

Fourteen of us packed up and drove to the mountains and nestled into a cabin.

We then told her of her value, her worth.  We formed a circle of women around her.  We read to her the Word of God.  We gave her gifts.  We prayed. We showered her with advice. We cried. 

And then we partied.  We ate lots and lots of carbs.  We played party games.  We decorated our hands and feet with henna.  We created an art project so she could carry this weekend with her forever. We laughed until our sides and our faces hurt.  And we kept it PG-13…barely.  When we got in the van to leave, Izzy burst out with “That was SOOOOOOOOOOOOO much fun!”  It was like she had been waiting all weekend to tell me that; to get Jade and me alone so she could reveal how awesome everything was.  And it was.  We not only told her that she was wonderful, we showed her what it was like to be a woman.  To cook together.  To talk about the things WE wanted to talk about.  To sit all huddled in front of the fire.  To show her the sisterhood that will, indeed, get you through your life intact.

When it was my turn in the circle, I reminder her of the words of Jesus, “You are the Light of the World.” 

And she is.

————–

To see more pictures from the weekend, click here to go to Christiana Childers Photography.

©2012 MamaBloo. All Rights Reserved.

I hope everyone had a great Halloween.  Now comes the fun part… stealing the candy from the kids’ stash.

©2012 MamaBloo. All Rights Reserved.

 My two oldest — Jade (14) and Izzy (13) — get up and ready for school on their own. ( I try not to feel too much guilt about not cooking them omlettes every morning – my energy isn’t endless…). Each morning they pile their backpacks and instruments next to our front door and wait for the HONK that signals the carpool is waiting outside.  About the time they get their shoes on and switch into “hang out” mode before the carpool arrives, Ty, Emme and I mosey on down from upstairs to start our day. 

But when Ty and Emme lay eyes on those two big girls, they go absolutely crazy with joy.  If Dora and Anakin and Buzz Lightyear all showed up at once, they wouldn’t get the kind of reception that Ty and Emme greet Jade and Izzy with every morning.

The next 10 minutes is a carinval of love from my two youngest to my two oldest.  Still in their jammies, Ty and Emme practically mob Jade and Izzy demanding the last few seconds of their attention before leaving for school.  Lego catalogs come out to be delved into, toys materialize,  the itsy bitsy spider and twinkle twinkle little star is sung…over and over… oh, and over and over… sometimes it is an imprompu game of hide-and-seek as Ty jumps under a blanket and instructs “come find me.”

Final snuggles are given and plans for their return in the afternoon are made (“If you don’t have a lot of homework, Izzy, will you play Wii with me?”).  When the HONK comes Emme and Ty both run out to give one final goodbye to their big girls as they drive off.  Ty shouting his BBYYEEE!!!!! and Emme blowing kisses with a MWAH ..MWAH.

It is only after all of this that I can change Emme’s diaper, make breaksfast, and get our morning focused on Kindergarten drop off and baby music class.

But I wouldn’t change it.

Jade will be heading off to college the year Emme enters Kindergarten — only 4 years away.  And it is the time they have together now — even those few minutes in the morning, or maybe especially those few minutes in the morning — that will part of their relationship forever.  There will be a day when Emme will run out to blow Jade a kiss and she won’t be coming home until Thanksgiving.  

So, until then, I will enjoy that the highlight of their morning is with each other.

©2012 MamaBloo. All Rights Reserved.