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.

This time I am talking about leaves.  Ya know, the ones that “fall” from the trees?  It is very deep.

Click here to head on over there and check it out!  And as usual, comments MAKE MY DAY!

Thanks!

©2012 MamaBloo. All Rights Reserved.

This doesn’t alarm me at all — I know that this is totally normal as kids grow up and explore family relationships and love.  Often times a kindergartener will want to marry the parent of the opposite sex.  Ty used to want to marry me, but I have been ousted for the new and improved model…little sister.

“Oh, Ty, I am so glad you love Emme so much.”  Even as I say this I am envisioning the torment she put him through only hours before.  How no matter what he wanted to play with, she snatched it out of his hands and ran off with it.  Not really an inaccurate foreshadowing to marriage, but still…

But just to be silly I ask Ty, “Why don’t you want to marry Lily?”  One of his older sister-cousins.

“Because, Mommy, she. wants. to. be. a. dentist!!!”

Of course, this makes perfect sense to me.

————–

Click here to learn more about why I don’t like the dentist.

©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.

Happy Thanksgiving!

©2012 MamaBloo. All Rights Reserved.

I had been longing for snow since last week.  I usually don’t like snow because in these parts the whole city shuts down and goes a little nuts. 

This year,  however, I  have been looking forward to the snow.  For a lot of the reasons. And ALL of them selfsih.  I have just been longing for a break from “real life” — a forced work haltage (is haltage a word??), hot chocolate, spiced wine, movie day, etc.  I spent the weekend stocking the fridge just in case there was snow.  I made a final trip to get Jade a winter coat and Lily snow boots.  I have been ready for days for snow.

So when the flakes waited until 7:30am to start falling I have to admit I was a little disappointed — the snow was beautiful but it came to late to halt school and offer me the respite I so longed for, and so off the teens went all bundled up.  I then spent the next part of the morning trying –unsuccessfully — to get Ty to wear snow boots to kindergarten.  “But, Mommy, they feel weird!”  That is because they are snow boots and you only wear them about 3 days each year.  You will get used to them.  No luck and on went the sneakers.  The outside temperature read 26 degress and so I gritted my teeth as I walked out the door to take Lily and Ty to school (by the way, Lily did wear her snowboots…).  The moment we walked outside I heard a GASP.

The gasp came from Emme.  In all the bustle of the morning I had forgotten that this was her first snow ever.  She stopped, looked up, smiled her big authentic, “I love life” smile, and pointed at all the flakes and rattled off her paragraph of gibberish that makes perfect sense only to her.  But this time  it was pretty clear what she was saying:  Snow is awesome.  Followed by: Why have you waited this long to show me this.  Then:  Isn’t life amazing, mom?

As the first flake got caught in her long lashes I thought about all that she has yet to discover.  And how lucky we moms are to re-discover so much through the eyes of our children.  We get to see so much for the first time all over again.  Watch as our children’s eye light up at their first Halloween, or eat their first tast of ice cream, or pet their first puppy.  Then we get to see them make their first goals in soccer, or play their first wobbly rendition of “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie” in elementary band.  We  get to see them have their first dates, fall in love, read Shakespeare. 

And we get to sit in horror as they cry because their friends didn’t walk home with them.  Or they didn’t make the goal.  We watch as they come to terms with the fact that life isn’t fair. Or Just.  And that many people don’t know the meaning of mercy or compassion.  And I swear that if I could I would stand in the gap for all five of my kids and take all the crap for them.  Just suck it in to my body and let it destroy me in order to spare them. 

But I know that is not how it works.   Even though I get to watch their journey, their road to discover is all their own.

So, TODAY  I will decide instead to find the patience to let them struggle with the lumpy snowboots and to marvel at the snowflakes in their eyelashes as they discover the world for themselves  — and for me, all over again.

©2012 MamaBloo. All Rights Reserved.

It is a well known fact that Ty can negotiate just about anything.  A friend and neighbor announced recently that he planned on having Ty — age five —  negotiate the re-fi’s on his mortgage.  I have to have nerves of steel and a heckofa line in the sand when Ty sets his sights on something.  And recently he set his sights on that box of Swiss Miss and that bag of marshmellows.

For days now he has been asking me about the weather report. It took me a while to figure out why.  His angle?  Rainy, wet, or even snowy weather equals….Hot Chocolate.  But I once I was onto him I could tell him, hey, it is not quite cold enough yet!   He then turned to the “others” he figured would cave in or at least didn’t know the rules.  He asked babysitters and friends for hot chocolate.  Nope.  No luck.

Driving home from school Monday afternoon he told me, Ah Mommy, I am soooooooooo cold. 

I was distracted by a garbage truck and the rain. Ah honey, I am so sorry.  What can we do to warm you up?

You see it coming, don’t you?  Well, I didn’t.  Moment of weakness, I guess.

I need Hot Chocolate.  He says in his sweetest, I love you mommy, voice.   So, I answered with the good ol’ mother standby.  Let me think about it. 

He smilled and then actually cackled.  Because, basically, he knew he had me at “I’ll think about it.” 

An hour later, out came the tea kettle.  Out came the mashmellows.  Out came the Swiss Miss.   I even got out the whole milk.

Okay, bud, I said.  You can have the hot chocolate on one condition.  You have to let me take your picture while you drink it.

I am pretty sure that his internal dialoge goes something like this… “SUCKAAHHHH!”

I am doomed, aren’t I???

©2012 MamaBloo. All Rights Reserved.