I love talking to you, and hearing your discoveries and ponderings about life. You think deeply about everything, and you are always aware of what the people around you might need. I have loved being your mommy as you grew from a tiny baby into a little boy, and I am excited to see how you grow and change from here. I have never been the mommy of a five year old before… I am honored to get the chance with you.
When I was a little girl, I never played tea party with my dolls. In fact, I don’t remember playing with my dolls very often, at all. My little sister kindly taught me how to play tea party, and I thank her for it. It’s something everyone should know how to do, especially if they one day find themselves having tea parties with their own children.
A bit ago, my son asked me to come to play with him. I was thrilled to be invited, because my kids are usually so deep into their imaginary worlds that I am given a side role, if that.
Then I realized that he wanted me to play tea party.
He had the whole thing set up on the couch. I was still feeling honored that he invited me to play, so of course I didn’t tell him that I am not very good at tea parties. As it turned out, this tea party included something else I am really bad at – playing cars. I think it’s safe to say that I am even worse at playing cars, than playing tea parties. Never the less… I did my best.
It’s hard to see in this picture, but there is a little (headless) Lego man, roasting on a fire. The cars are all sitting around, waiting to be served. Ian allowed me to serve the top half, and he served the legs. After all of the cars had been given their servings, we put them to bed. Then we set out art supplies, for them to discover in the morning.
When I was a little girl, I really had no idea what being a parent would bring. I am amazed at the depth and beauty it brings to my life. I would never have dreamed that I would be so honored to be invited to play with my boy. Or that a tea party could include Lego-eating cars. Or that I would ever say, “Are you enjoying your roasted torso?”
This year with you has been wonderful. You live life with such curiousity, and find joy in every situation. Everything you do, you do with sweet intensity. I love you, and I am very proud of you.
Since writing this post, I had the opportunity to find out what happens when I do get really sick. I did not, in fact, whip up a five course meal. What I did do was spend some time laying around and feeling very sorry for myself. I haven’t been that sick in awhile, and I always forget how bad it feels.
Along with feeling sorry for myself, however, I spent some time feeling very thankful. On Friday, when I felt my worst, I couldn’t sleep for most of the night. In between whining to myself about how miserable I felt, I was constantly thankful that we co-sleep. I couldn’t imagine having to get out of bed, calm a fussy baby, get him back to sleep, and repeat throughout the night, when I was feeling that awful. I know that different sleeping arrangements work better for different families, but I personally love having my baby next to me.
I also spent a lot of time thinking about how very thankful I am to live here, with the luxuries that I have. I have a husband who does even more around here when I am sick. Some of my friends don’t have anyone to help them parent, let alone wash clothes and dishes.
And beyond that, all night long I thought about water, and how I take it for granted. (I was pretty dehydrated at this point…)
I can get clean, fresh water any time I need it. There are women and families all over the world that do not have that luxury. I kept thinking about women, or even children, who feel as bad as I felt, and still need to go draw water from a well, and carry it back. And the water that they have access to isn’t necessarily clean. According to Living Water International, some household in Africa spend up to 26% of their time getting water for their family. And 1.8 million children die every year because of unclean water.
That is 5,000 deaths a day. Today. Right Now.
I hadn’t intended for this to be a Thanksgiving post, but as I am writing the day before – and writing about my thankfulness – it is clearly turning into one. So here is what I am thankful for, this year.
My children are not dying of thirst. They are not dying of diseases from unsafe water. I can give my family clean water every day, without even thinking about it.
And although it is Thanksgiving time, I am not content to just voice my thankfulness. Tomorrow, when we eat Thanksgiving meal, everyone will go around and say what they are thankful for this year. I am not willing to sit in a chair, with more food than I can eat in front of me, and say out loud that I am thankful for my children’s health, and eat the rest of my food, and drive home, and feel content and justified that I have given proper thanks for my blessings, while other women’s babies are dying.
There are several organizations that provide wells for communities that need them, World Vision and Living Water International being two of them. While I do not think that kind of donation is the end of my thought process, it is certainly a place to begin.
I have found that I do my worst parenting when I am parenting out of fear. This is true when I am afraid for my children’s safety, but it’s even more true when I am parenting in fear in regards to my children’s behavior.
When I am listening to the voice in my head that says, “if you let them get away with this, they will want to do it again…”, I lose my creativity. I lose my perspective. I lose my ability to keep my temper. As soon as I let my fear of “what if” override what is really happening in the here and now; I create a battle where there doesn’t have to be one.
My children are responsible for helping with our daily chore. In the beginning of this routine, I felt that I needed to draw a hard line in making them help. Because if I let them get away with slacking off once, surely they would want to do it again. And I was afraid of loosing control of that situation. More than once, I created a meltdown that didn’t need to happen. It certainly didn’t get the cleaning done. It did nothing for my relationship with my children. It didn’t teach them anything about perseverance or hard work. And at the end of the day, I knew that I had let my fear turn into anger, and treated my children unfairly.
I have since discovered that if one of my children isn’t as into cleaning that day, it is ok to back off. That day of not helping doesn’t turn into a life time of trying to get out of work. They return to chore time the next day ready and willing to help. If I just keep doing my thing, and working with the child who is wanting to work, the other one often joins right in.
There are so many things to be afraid of. If I don’t get him to sleep on time tonight, he will think bedtime is negotiable every night. If I let her draw on her arms, she will think she can draw on her arms whenever she wants. This fear gets me nowhere. I am not a better parent for it. My children are not learning anything from it. When will I learn to let go of this?
It’s the fear that if I don’t somehow control my kids’ immaturity, they will always be this immature.
It gets a little easier, as my oldest grows. Things that were all encompassing before are not even issues now. He doesn’t throw his food on the floor. He doesn’t throw his toys. Someday he will learn all of the other things I am trying so hard to teach him. I suspect he would learn them better, if I relaxed and let him learn.
When I am parenting in the moment, I am able to keep my temper. I am more creative. I can be the parent I want to be, without letting the behavior of a child determine my mood. I keep my perspective and my sense of humor… and, of all things, my children actually learn by what they see me do, when the message doesn’t get lost in my frustration and anger.
So what do you do if…
Your son comes and tell you there are “strange creatures” in a bucket in the backyard.
And upon further investigation, they turn out to be mosquito larva.
And as you go to dump the big bucket, your children decide that they need some, to have.
And as they watch their “flippers”, they start asking all sorts of questions and making observations.
“Mommy, what do they eat?”
“…. maybe they eat SOUND!”
“Mommy, they swim down into the sand when they see me looking at them.”
“Mommy! Maybe mosquitos don’t bite because they drink blood; maybe they bite because they are scared of us!”
Meanwhile Chava is putting sand into her water, and stirring it up for them. And trying to hold them in her hands… ”
So, what do you do, as a homeschooling mama, with two buckets of mosquitos on your back porch? Do you leave them there? Or dump them out?
I suspect we’ll have many similar dilemas around here…
I have written a lot about our art projects, and I think it would be easy to get the impression that we only do art all day. While it is true that we do a good bit – at least something every day, some days much more – it isn’t the only thing we do around here. As school is starting up again, and I have been thinking about preschool, I have come back again to my main goals for my family.
I have several priorities for our time, access to art supplies being one of them. But even above the specific goals that I have, my over arching desire is that my kids have free time.
I want my kids to have time to just be kids. I feel like above almost anything else, this is a gift that they can never have again. Although there is a lot of pressure to teach kids very early, I am not worried that a lack of direct “teaching” at three or four will be an obstacle for my children later in life. When they are thirty, they will have learned to read, do basic math, tie their shoes. What I want for them right now is what they can never have at thirty – time to just be four. Time to just be two.
I want my kids to play in the backyard every day. I want them to get dirty. I want them to find out what happens when they fill that hole up with water. (A toad pops out! Who knew? We’ve been wondering what that hole was all year.) I want to be able to do art projects that get messy. I want time to say, “sure, we can read that book. And that one too.” I want them to use their muscles, and their senses, and their brains. I want them to invent and investigate. I want them to get bored, and find ways to fill up the boredom. I want them to learn that life is hard, but it is good, and it is worth living.
And writing it all down, it seems so straightforward. But the truth is, it’s hard. There are so many ways that our days get filled up with stuff. There are so many things that are good to do, that can very quickly add up, until there is no down time. It is sometimes hard to trust that my children won’t loose out because I am not sitting them down to teach them their letters or numbers. I know that my kids spend their time differently than some others their age, and it’s sometimes hard to believe that I am not holding them back.
But then I watch our days together, and I am again struck by the magic of just being a kid. I see how much they sink into their play, and how much they learn from it. As an adult, I fight for every minute that I am truly just living. I treasure their ability to be in the moment, and I want to protect it.
Today has been quite a day. We have run the gambit of emotions in this house, from completely silly to complete meltdown; many times. At the end of the day, I am left thinking again about what a strange life being a stay-at-home mom is.
One of the things that I find so unique about this job, is that there is no one in this house with me as I parent. I am here by myself almost every day, and I answer only to people under the age of five. (I am relatively sure their standards of acceptable behavior are different than typical jobs require.)
Every aspect of my day is my own. The times I lost my temper, and said words I regreted even as I was saying them. No one else heard me, no one else was here to reign me in. There is no one here to spell me off, to tell me to take a break, to tell me to shape up or get out. I am responsible for stopping myself. (I walked away; called my husband, called my mom)
There is no one here to see my best moments. The times I’m exhausted, and my head hurts, and someone needs one more thing. The times I do not loose my temper. The times I choose to be silly and break the mood. The times I find just enough energy to change the dynamic. I don’t get paid, I don’t get promoted, I don’t get a review or feedback. I do get children who want to show me what they are learning, who want me to laugh with them, who want me to be a part of their world.
And then there are the thousands of silly, magical, or just ordinary moments that make up our days. No one is here to laugh at my daughter’s two-year-old logic. No one sees how cute the baby was, when he was laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. No one saw my son give his never-been-opened crayons to his baby sister, without batting an eyelash.
So many of the funniest moments aren’t anything that can be shared, because you just have to be here. And the moments where everything just falls into places – my favorite little times of the day – are just so comfortable and beautiful because they are my family, my house, my hard work.
I love being a mom, but it is a strange, hard job.
One of the things that is highly entertaining and occasionally frustrating about raising my kids is; they do not use anything for its intended purpose.
Toys that are extremely limited in their use get turned into all kinds of things. One of Chava’s favorite ‘babies’ is a broom. Ian often makes “contraptions”, which can be made of pretty much anything, for pretty much anything. Their art projects go the same way; whatever I thought they were doing, it very quickly turns into something else. And then something else again.
The success of the project, or game, or day really hinges on whether I stick to my idea of what should be happening, or let the kids go and do their own thing. When we tried to make macaroni necklaces, I was irritated that they didn’t want to actually string the macaroni. Why? Because I wanted them to experience a different craft than we had done before, have some fun, use their creativity. But I wanted them to do it the right way. The way that ends in necklaces, not the way that ends in noodles buried in the sandbox.
Why does it matter? They didn’t care about the necklaces. They had fun digging up the noodles. They got to play outside, they were entertained.
At this point, when we get a new toy or start a new project, I expect it to turn out completely differently than intended. The funny thing is, no matter how much I know this, I still can’t predict what it is they will actually do. Life is continually interesting in this house.
We do a lot of art around here, but for the last couple of months that has been a bit on the back burner, as we’ve been spending as much time as we can outside. Now that it’s getting too hot to play (the high today was 105), the kids are suddenly asking for “projects” again.
It’s been really neat to watch them the last week or so. Both of them are suddenly doing more with their creativity than they were before.
Ian hasn’t really been into drawing ‘things’ at all; he likes to just put colors on the paper. I’ve been struggling with whether I should introduce the idea of drawings that actually represent something, or just let him come up with it on his own. We’ve talked about drawing shapes and people before, but it’s just not something he’s been interested in. But this past week, he sat down and drew a really neat picture.
Ian’s ‘Superman’
Chava’s ‘Lizard’
It was especially fun to listen to him talk to himself about what he was doing. He put in “Superman”, and then decided that he needed Night and Day. He mumbled to himself about needing a black crayon and a blue crayon for that. Then he added a circle around the whole thing, and some “bad guys”, and some “things to fight the bad guys”. (Which leaves me a little confused, because to the best of my knowledge, he’s never seen Superman in his life. Maybe it’s genetic.)
Both of my kids are really into art that is more three dimensional. Which might be why Ian ripped up his really cool picture that I had planned to save forever, as part of the project. Luckily, I had taken pictures.
There’s been a change in their three dimensional art, as well. They are much more deliberate about what they are doing. Ian especially is trying to recreate something he sees in his mind, rather than just put things together and see what happens. He’s also been much more specific about what he wants. Instead of asking to paint, he’ll ask if he can make a mouse, and cut it out, and glue it to a Popsicle stick, and make it into a puppet.
The funny thing about their projects is the way they turn into so many other things along the way. Ian’s mouse became a frog on a lily pad, and then some smaller frogs, and then a bunch of itty bitty pieces of paper. Because really, it is still very much about the process for them. I don’t consider myself to be artistic at all, so I haven’t given much thought to how art works. But it makes sense to me that there is so much ‘process’ behind the finished product. I would think any artist puts that much thought into their work, and that their work goes through just as many stages and metamorphoses before they are satisfied. I would guess there are many times with the end result is no where near what they originally envisioned.
I am still adjusting a little bit to this new way of doing things. Before they would ask for paint, and I’d hand them paint. Now Ian wants to make something that is real to him. So I ask “what do you need for that?” His answers surprise me, and I am so intrigued by the way his mind puts things together. It’s also fun to watch them with more materials. They come up with things I wouldn’t have dreamed of putting together. My job is to give them what they ask for, and stay out of the way.