birthday boy

Last week we celebrated the middle little's birthday.  It came during a week of straight-up chaos - their house "flooded" Tuesday night due to a faucet malfunction in the upstairs bathroom, and water ran down through ceilings and floors all the way to the basement.  They camped out with us all week, and we celebrated his birthday with grilled cheese sandwiches and (Campbell's) chicken noodle soup - his choice.  :)

Imagine his delight when he opened this gift - the one thing he wanted more than anything was a remote control monster truck!

Unfortunately for him, there's more to the story:

Love the singing, love the "cha-cha-cha" and love the long-distance candle blowout.  Love this boy.

(I'm thinking the marketers missed the boat here - this should be advertised as educational: "This product is guaranteed to teach your child delayed gratification every single day!  No lesson plans or parent preparation necessary! Any frustration experienced by the child may be redirected toward the product, thus maintaining peace and harmony in your home.")

Thursday night was his kindergarten graduation - a mass of six-year-olds on risers ... never a good thing.  Let's just say he and the kid next to him punched each other a lot, and a little girl in front of them inexplicably fell off the riser.  :)

Happy birthday, buddy - we love you so!

mr. fox's revelations

Oh, the places you can go in 90 minutes with the Littles!  I wish I had taken my camera ... then again, I would have been relegated to observer status and the evening probably would not have unfolded as it did.

First, dinner.  Leftovers for all ... even though they each chose their own fare, none were pleased.  I'll spare you the whining. Then, homework.  Quick and easy; you can tell the school year is almost over.  And out to play we go!

With the swings, monkey bars, tree climbing (Lexi is just downright scary in that tree, by the way), the hula hoop (not me, thanks) and a pitiful game of catch (Callie is the only one of the four of us that regularly catches the ball) behind us, Mason suggested we play "What Time is it Mr. Fox?"  After five minutes of yelling and negotiating between Lexi and Mason, I finally figured out that we were going to play some version of tag.

It went like this:  Mason was Mr. Fox, at one end of the yard.  We girls stood at the other fence and yelled (you got it), "WHAT TIME IS IT, MR. FOX?"   At this point he is supposed to give us a number between 1 and 12.  We are to take that number of steps toward him.  This makes sense to me, clock, time, etc.  His response: "Twenty hundred!"  Lexi yells at him that it has to be less than 12.  He pouts, lip out, arms crossed, the whole shebang.  He states that there are 24 hours in a day so he should be able to go up to 24.  I peel Lexi off the (proverbial) ceiling and get her to agree he can go up to 24.  We ask again, "WHAT TIME IS IT, MR. FOX?" and he tells us 9.  We walk 9 steps toward him. We ask again, he answers 14, we walk 14 steps toward him.  And so on.  We get closer and closer to him, and at any time, he could say "MIDNIGHT!"... at which point we should all turn and run back to the fence.  He should then chase us down and the first person he tags is now Mr(s). Fox.  (2011 version of "you're it!") 

Here's the problem - he really likes being Mr. Fox, so even when he has walked us nose to nose with him and he finally yells "MIDNIGHT," he never attempts to tag anyone.  In fact he doesn't even move an inch.  Meanwhile the three of us have hightailed it back to the fence, and he's still standing at the other end of the yard.

Predictably, Lexi is furious.  After the third round of this, I basically tackled him and said he tagged me, mostly to keep Lexi from losing her mind.  He pouts.  Now I'm Mrs. Fox, and of course I play by the rules, they ask me "what time" and I get them close to me, step by step, then I yell, "MIDNIGHT!"  They start running ... well the girls start running and Mason plants himself in front of me.  I skirt around him and since Lexi is already back to the fence, I chase Callie down and tag her ... and she flips out crying.  Like, bawling her head off, hitching sobs crying.  I'm holding her and asking her what's wrong and trying to see where she's bleeding (I didn't knock her down, I swear!), and when she can finally answer me:  "I just didn't WANT you to tag me!"  And she kept crying.

You get the picture, right?  We attempted various versions of this for about 30 minutes.  I'm wiped out, Lexi is yelling the rules at everyone and trying to make order out of chaos, Mason is pouting and breaking all the rules and generally creating chaos, and Callie is half-crying the whole time.  Mr. Fox certainly backed up all I know about birth order (my own included)!

uncommon tribute

Mother's Day.  Celebrated far and wide.  Around tables, in churches, over the phone, in restaurants, in parks, backyards, visiting, laughing.  Celebrating.

I love that.

But I can't help but think about so many women who are childless on Mother's Day.  The ones who have lost a baby, a child, a teenager, an adult child.  The ones who never had a child, whether they wanted one desperately, never got around to it, or chose not to have one.  The ones who are estranged.  The ones who are forgotten.  This is probably not a day to celebrate for them.

However, HOWEVER.  We SHOULD celebrate every woman we know on this day, regardless of their "mother" status.  Because every woman on this planet has had an impact on many, many people.  Think about all the other women in your lives besides your mother that have made a difference in your life.  Stop.  Think.  There are countless numbers of them, right?  School teachers.  Sunday school teachers.  Neighbors.  Your friends' moms. Your friends now. Mentors.  And more than likely, some of them are not mothers in the celebrating Mother's Day kind of way.  But more than likely, we would not be who were are today without them.

For me, I was shaped and molded and made who I am by my mothers (I happen to have two ... that's a whole 'nother blog.)  I am so grateful to both of them and I love them so much.  I am blessed beyond measure to have not only the two of them but also my mother-in-law still here with me, and all three of them actively involved in my life.

I can also think of many other women who have poured into my life and made a difference, young and old, rich and poor, skinny and ... well you get the drift.  Some of them are mothers, some of them are not. They don't replace my mothers. But I am thankful for each and every one of them.

So today, as you celebrate your mothers, consider reaching out this coming week to some of the other women who have impacted your life.  They may not even know they made a difference, and you might just make their day.

heard one Sunday

Brooke lobbed me a good topic today!  (See come play with me if I've lost you.)  :)  I'm mulling it over and will give it a go soon.    

Meanwhile, we took the littles to church with us yesterday.  After collecting them from Sunday School, we crammed them into our (usually roomy) Malibu for the ride home.  Get the visual here - a 7, a 5, and a 3-year-old sitting cheek to cheek.  So by default they're touching each other BEFORE they even start touching each other!  Trying to avoid the inevitable, I started asking them questions.  Lexi enthusiastically said, "My class was GREAT today!"  I was a little surprised - she is usually pretty reserved.  So I asked her what she learned about ... "The Holy Spirit!" she said. 

Well, I immediately gave mental kudos to the brave souls that were willing to tackle the Holy Spirit with first graders!  Then I thought, hmmm, I probably should ask for more information before I'm TOO impressed, right?  So here's how it went:

Me:  "Who is the Holy Spirit?"
Lex: "He's God!"
Me: "How can HE be God?  God is God."
Lex:  "He is!  Jesus and God and the Holy Spirit are all God.  There's three of them, but they're all one too, you can't understand it but it's just true."
Me: "You're right ... but God lives in heaven, so where does the Holy Spirit live?"
Lex: "Inside me."
Me: "Inside you?  Why?"
Lex: "To guide my path, to guide me every day!"

WOW.  Yep, I'm seriously impressed with the Sunday school teacher, the curriculum, the staff, whoever and whatever put yesterday's lesson together in a way that sent her home with TRUTH LIKE THIS!  Wow.

(an aside ... throughout this whole conversation, there is a running commentary from Callie, whom I repeatedly shush because this is important stuff we're talking about)


Then Mason:  "Well, 'Bobby' (not his real name) said somethin' to me that I didn't agree with."

It's Mason, right?  So I'm expecting something like, "He said spiderman has wings."  Nope - "He said the Holy Spirit was the devil!" 

Me:  "Well, you're right to disagree - that isn't true.  What do you think?"
Mason: "I think the devil's a serpent."
Lexi: "He used to be an angel but he wanted to be like God so God threw him out of heaven.  But I think he can be a serpent."

So here's my invitation to give them the age-appropriate version of Creation and The Fall (Genesis 3).  I told them the story of the devil (as a serpent) giving Eve the apple she wasn't supposed to eat, and that when she and Adam made the choice to eat it they disobeyed God.  I told them what the results were ... why it mattered ... how their own little world is changed because of that bite.

Mason:  "But what if the serpent cut off an apple from the tree they weren't sposed to eat from and glued it onto the tree they COULD eat from, then gave them that apple they weren't sposed to eat but they didn't know it?  What would happen then?"

Uh ... ok got it.  "Well, then it would have been a trick and they wouldn't have CHOSEN to disobey God, so that's different.  What's important, though, is what DID happen, and that it happened because they didn't obey God."

Lexi:  "Besides, MASON, that could never happen anyway because a serpent doesn't have ARMS!!"

And the final act ... Callie ... "Nini, Nini, is it my turn ta talk?  My talk now?  Can I talk?"

OK Callie - it's your turn.  What did you want to say?

Callie:  "Umm .... ummmm .... Nini?  My fingernails need paint."

Mind-blowing and hilarious 15 minute drive home.  God is good, all the time, and oh how I love those littles!

five favorites

Hi Kooky,

Tiny's never-ending soliloquy is a melliflous backdrop to the cacophony of the tv, the ubiquitous presence of two unhappy felines and of course, Excruciatingly Loud Middle Little & Bossy Big Little.  

Wudge!

The first four are my current favorites just because I like the way they sound.  I get a kick out of trying to work them into regular conversation.

The last one, wudge, may disqualify me because it's not technically a word, but it's my all-time favorite.  When Lexi was just starting to talk, "I love you" was one syllable for the longest time - "wudge."  It has endured in our family despite the fact that she has no longer knows what it means (which makes me a little sad, to tell you the truth).

So I'll add another, just to be sure:  REALLY?!  Note that this one must be bolded, capitalized, and followed by both a question mark and an exclamation point ... it is an all-purpose word that can mean:  "Are you kidding me??" or "Are you SURE?" and generally infers sarcasm (one of my specialties), rolled up nicely into two syllables.

Frankly, you could ask me this question every week and get a different answer - I LOVE WORDS!  Probably not an accident that "word" rhymes with "nerd."

Happy Sunday!  Who's next?