Adventure. Intrigue. Tissues.

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She grabs a tissue, blows nothing into it but a force of air, folds it over and blows again. Then, she finds a brush, lifts it to her head, eyes batting as she runs the wrong end down the back of her head and she tucks it into the diaper bag where I like to keep it. She wanders into the kitchen, grabbing hold of the dishtowel with an idea. She tucks it under her chin, displaying all of the willful imprecision one does when trying patiently to figure out the world, and folds it over her belly like a shirt from the dryer.

It’s not hearing her say real words or watching her learn to climb and jump and count. What I love the most about this age, every burly bit of 19 months, is watching her pretend to be me; casually accustomed to life.

So much of her time on Earth so far has been just mastering the basics. Eating with a spoon. Drinking from a cup. Cooperating so that I can get a shirt over her head. It’s all been so primitive that watching her do new things like pull a pot from it’s cabinet and a wooden ladle from it’s drawer so that she can pretend to stir soup, handing out to me sips that she gives a thoughtful blow to first… it kind of reminds me that she’s human.

It’s easy to forget when she’s romping through the house, screeching like an irked animal because she can’t run as fast as she wants to holding onto a box of mashed potatoes, that she’ll grow out of this phase. She won’t always be so much like a happily wayward pet I can only keep from running amuck with body language and tone of voice.

Someday the world will make at least as much sense to her as it needs to and she’ll do things like blow her nose and brush her hair without a second thought to how it’s done, while her mind focuses on other, more important things. All motive to break a sweat putting her brother’s sneakers on over the footies of her own pajamas, or to stomp off crying because I won’t let her dig through the garbage will dissipate with age as she becomes more versed in the rhyme and reason of everyday things.

She may not be scaling fences or doing jujitsu just yet, but these little everyday grips she gets on the world remind me that this incredible month with her is just the beginning. Today, the Velcro on her patent leather shoes. Tomorrow, the world. Or at least the backyard.

　

Oh, what adventures await you?

Guess What: Nothing Sucks!

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Putting our ice creams together.

You know how they say that just when you figure out why your kids are acting a certain way, they’ll stop acting that way and you’ll have something new to figure out all over again? That’s our biggest issue right now. For the first time in a long time, nothing sucks. Life around here has suddenly gotten exponentially easier, out of the freakin blue. And it’s kind of really strange getting used to.

For a while there, family life was becoming incredibly difficult to manage. Each one of our kids was wreaking havoc on our home in their own number of ways; pushing us to be better parents in everything that they did to test us. Our marriage went through a real rough patch there after Spencer’s accident (which I’m only confident enough to talk openly about now because it is SO much better). And because all of us were driving each other a little nutty, it was hard to figure out if what we needed was more quality time together or a little bit of time apart. When you’re a family, ‘together’ always wins. But making it happen was a new challenge altogether.

Spencer and I really struggled to figure out how we were going to up the amount of time we all spent together as a family, at the same time we were deciding to make it a bigger priority for us to individually spend one-on-one time with each of the kids alone, on top of continuing to make time for us to work on our romantic relationship, without cutting ourselves off from what little “me” time we were left with at the end of it all to pursue our personal interests. (Pant, pant…) I realize that sounds a little ambitious to take on all at once, but if you knew what kind of damage control we were dealing with, I think you’d understand. We even toyed with the idea of visiting a family councilor because for a little while, it felt like we were in over our heads. We have an incredible marriage, don’t get me wrong. But when you’ve got three kids at the other end of every mistake you make together, you just don’t fuck around when it comes to getting your shit straight. Y’know what I mean?

Then, kind of out of the blue, the winds died down and the clouds parted over us.

Scarlett suddenly learned to do something marginally resembling actual communication, so her temper tantrums have all but vanished into the shadow of this impenetrable force of happiness all the time. She’s finally jumped the developmental hurdle stopping her from being able to color quietly for five minutes without shoving a colored pencil up her nostril or throwing the bucket of crayons at her brother in a rage. She can even eat soup (SOUP!) on her own without spilling but a few, manageable drips. Get this: Matthew, the other day? AT A SALAD. Plus, he’s started meeting his friends (a brother-sister combo who live four houses down, and unlike us, have a swingset and a fenced in backyard) at their house to play every afternoon while I cook dinner in total peace. TOTAL, SCARLETT’S ASLEEP AND MATTHEW’S NOT EVEN HERE AND MARY’S ON THE PHONE, WANTING TO BE LEFT ALONE BECAUSE SHE’S ALREADY DONE HER CHORES ANYWAY PEACE.

The result is that when we’re all together and awake, we want to be. We really, really, run-to-my-arms-shouting-MOMMA!, “oh my Gosh, little buddy, you’ve been gone for an hour, Momma MISSED you!” want to be.

My mom called last week asking if for the first time, she and my dad could just take Scarlett for an over-nighter at their house for some one-on-one grandparent time. I LOVED the idea. We have some lovable kids, but Scarlett stands out as, hands down, the most openly affectionate child we have. Unfortunately because she falls in line as being not only the third of our children, but the fifth grandchild on one side of the family and the TENTH on the other, it was sort of understood that she’d probably get jipped out of having too much one-on-one time with much of anyone, like, ever.

Spence and I took the opportunity to do something with Mary and Matthew we never get to do because Scarlett’s too young to participate and too old to not run away or try to kill herself on something she doesn’t understand. We went bowling, and it was a blast. Matthew was a total crack up; Mary scored hilariously bad but STILL left asking if we could make bowling a monthly thing; and Spencer and I got to meet up with some friends afterward at a restaurant… A real, sit-down restaurant (without having to tend to any busted baby chins or spilled drinks or chicken being tossed into the booth behind us while we were distracted scolding our other two children, wrestling each other across the table -- which is basically what our last outing to a restaurant with Scarlett looked like) where we actually… you know, talked; chalking our rough patch off to each other as a funny, little thing of the past. Something we made it through.

Meanwhile, Scarlett was treated to a Texas Road House lunch, a small shopping spree and Matthew’s top-secret, special stash of Hot Wheels cars my mom keeps locked away for when he visits… and if I know my parents, probably a small drizzle of chocolate syrup in her bottle before bed.

Lord knows I’d hate to chance jinxing it, but dare I say? Making everyone (everyone) happy nowadays actually feels kind of effortless. Like maybe we’re not as entirely bad at this as we give ourselves credit for. After all, true love is like a fart. If you have to force it, it's probably shit. Sometimes though, it's just a really close call.

The Art of the Perpetually Misspelled Word.

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*Unrelated note: No Soliciting signs don't work. Everyone just knocks on your door saying, "I'm not here to sell you this thing I have; I just want to LET YOU KNOW that it exists."  

Recently, Matthew’s interest in reading independently has taken a real dive, so our focus has shifted onto writing. It might be because we’ve taken a two month hiatus from our Reading Eggs program or it could just be because he’s branching out to develop interests in new things. One of the major advantages to him being such an early reader has always been that when his interest ebbs and flows like this, I can let it. He can take as much time as he needs to find his way back to wanting it again on his own accord. I’m very big on readiness learning.

Coincidentally, his greatest interest for a good, solid while now has been writing. To my way of thinking, to write requires spelling, which is all braided into reading anyway. Awesomesauce.

Only, that hasn’t really gone down the way I expected it to. Matthew has delved into writing with all of the gusto he did reading, and then some. Our preschool activities involve writing a sentence or two a few times a week in his morning journal and mailing letters out to friends and family. Even when we aren’t in preschool mode though, he’s ALWAYS got a pen in his hand (writing “stories”, putting captions to his drawings, labeling pictures in magazines with magic marker) but he’s very particular about the words being “his.” To his way of thinking, if the words are his, than he should have creative license over how they’re spelled.

I tried to tackle this with a gentle, inconspicuous nudge from all angles, but he is totally unwilling to budge. “My words, my spelling,” he says. For a long time I thought it was adorable, and frankly, even if he wasn’t sharpening his ability to spell every time that he sat down to write something, he was still learning, having fun and developing other skills, like punctuation and penmanship. (Those, for some reason, he doesn’t mind being taught how to do correctly. Go figure.)

So I let him have at misspelling all the words he wanted to.

At this age, it’s pretty strictly the love of a subject, not the mastery of it, that we’re striving to develop anyway. And by that logic, we’re right on target. The boy does love to write. He practically has a novel of misspelled words written down the back of his bedroom door (even his mischievous antics involve writing nowadays) and I’ve had to start trashing some of the “stories” he tears from the pages of his loose-leaf Lightning McQueen notebook because he just writes so many of them; each about seven to ten pages long. Seeing as he’s a little young to be really needing to tackle spelling anyway, I kind of wrote spelling off as one of those things he’d probably more or less get the hang of just by playing around with so much. By the same token, if I’m always on his back about spelling words correctly, I knew I ran the risk of sucking all of the fun out of it in the first place.

After a while I couldn’t help feeling like it seemed an awful waste of such a perfect learning opportunity sometimes, because he just wrote SO MUCH, and he didn’t really seem to be making any great strides on the spelling front… But I ultimately decided that loving to write took precedence over writing with perfect skill, so I kept my mouth shut.

Then, it got trickier. His six year old friend once misspelled his name in chalk on the driveway. She very adorably wrote: I [heart] Math you, which of course I HAD to get a picture of and make kind of a fuss over. (I mean, c’mon, is that not the cutest thing ever, or what?) Well, Matthew noticed, and for about two months, took to misspelling his name the same way. This, I eventually debugged, but it took a good deal of convincing to make happen. “But it’s my name,” was his argument. “Why can’t I just spell it like I hear it?” He knows that some words aren’t spelled exactly the way that they sound (he came up with the names Wacky Words or Ghost Sounds for these) and he can read them just fine. But the same principle doesn’t apply so easily to writing. On the upside, he’s getting a ton of practice at isolating the sounds inside of each word, which has led to him learning how to spell some words really well -- just, you know, not many.

I was really interested to hear from my mom that that’s actually the way my older brother was willfully taught to begin spelling. When he started kindergarten, he was encouraged to spell the words he wrote however they sounded to him like they should be spelled. At the time she thought it was a dumb idea, she said, but once his class reached the part of the unit where they re-learned how to spell the words correctly, it clicked easily and he went on to do very well with spelling ever since.

　

Matthew’s been on this mega-psycho-obsessive writing kick for a solid three months now. And it’s probably been about that long since he’s been willing to sit down with a book of any real length and read aloud. I’m beginning to worry about this misspelling craze undoing what he’s learned about “Wacky Words” and “Ghost Sounds”. I’m sure he’ll pick up an interest in wanting to read again, (I even bit the bullet and paid for a 12 month subscription to Reading Eggs finally) but will he have effectively untaught himself everything by then?

What’s your take?

A Boy And His Car, And His Crybaby Mom.

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I took a few pictures of Matthew in the El Camino last night. He was pretending to drive while Spencer worked on the truck next to it. I tried to grab a more candid shot than this, which only resulted in about 27 pictures of motion blur holding onto the steering wheel. I almost gave up on it until Spencer mentioned how cool it’ll be to put the picture I take that day next to one of him actually learning to drive it for the first time in eleven or twelve years.

Is it just me or does my skin actually lose a layer of thickness to it every time someone makes mention of my children growing up?

Filtered Reality.

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I want to get real for a minute. Like, peeing with the door open real.

I make it a point to never intentionally stretch the truth on my blog (unless trying to protect the innocent by changing names or something), but I’ll let you in on a secret: I suck in a lot of ways that I conveniently choose not to broadcast.

For example, I’ve strategically opted on more than one occasion not to photograph Scarlett in her diapers because… well, they’re disposable. I write a lot about educating Matthew because it’s an area that shines a favorable light on the both of us, but I don’t write a lot about our stuggling-to-be-organic diet because most organic things available are a shit-ton too expensive for us to buy. As long as it isn’t expired, our kids drink whatever cancer causing milk the grocery store supplies and moreover, they drink it out of Playtex sippie cups that don’t come in stainless steel or glass. Sometimes (and not that often, but still sometimes) I feed my kids MSG laden soups for lunch just because they’re so much easier than anything else, being both microwavable and literally the only thing besides pizza that they’ll all eat without complaining.

This isn’t going to be a self-righteous post about how it’s okay to do all of this stuff because the truth is, these are things I wish I was better about. These aren’t even things that would be too altogether difficult to change. They’re just things that I haven’t. I almost put “yet,” but the truth is that at this point, I don’t know if I ever will or I won’t. That’s not what this is about.

This is about the wry fact that if I didn’t have a blog, I probably wouldn’t even care. For better and worse alike, blogging has been a pretty big influence on my priorities as a parent.

When I was 21 and pregnant fresh out of college with my son, I remember reading in the What To Expect book that it was wise to decide around the particular month I was in, whether or not disposables or cloth diapers were a better fit for us. I grimaced. Seriously, I thought, how outdated is this book? Do cloth diaper services even exist still?? Didn’t those things die off with the Milkman? Before I started my blog, I thought cloth diapers still fastened together with safety pins and that you had to hire a service to come out to your house and collect the dirty load when they dropped off fresh ones. Obviously it was the “greener” thing to do, but so were a lot of things that nobody does because they’re just absurdly impractical (and/or nefariously unsanitary - like reverting to pinning washable rags into your underwear instead of buying tampons once a month). I knew exactly 0% of nobody who had ever cloth diapered except for my parent’s parent’s generation and that was because they had no other choice.

I started my blog between the time Matthew was potty trained and Scarlett was conceived. Still, cloth diapers were very intimidating to me. Whenever I’d mention even the thought of maybe, possibly wanting to try them out, the idea was generally ill-recieved. I think when it first started resurfacing, cloth diapering was revered as some new-age hippie trend, but around here nowadays it’s something that’s ironically thought of as kind of hoity-toity. Like it’s this big, ambitious thing that only people who think disposable diapering is beneath them partake of.

For more than just that reason (I promise), we went disposable with Scarlett too. I’m not proud of it (and you should go all Fuzzibunz or BumGenius if you’re on the fence yourself: here is a good, down to Earth testament to that) but the funny thing is that it’s not something I’m embarrassed of out in the ‘real’ world. I literally don’t know anyone in the flesh beside a few young moms (each of whom also have blogs) that go cloth. My mom has owned a popular daycare that takes in a lot of traffic for the entirety of my existence and has never once that I’ve seen cared for a child who wore cloth diapers. It’s just not something that’s embraced around here the way that it seems to be in other places. But in the blogging community, mentioning the word disposable (except in a list of reasons NOT to use them) is about as taboo as farting in church on purpose. NOBODY who is ANYBODY does it.

Sometimes I resent my love of blogging for the ways that it makes me feel inadequate. But the truth is that it makes me a better mother, even without successfully converting me from disposable diapers.

In the name of full disclosure, blogging hasn’t effected everything I do by any means. There are some things we suck at by blogging standards simply because it’s the path we’ve chosen deliberately, even after considering the alternatives… even knowing that some choices we’ve made would be blasphemous to admit on blogger.

Even assuming that other people are probably at least a little, teeny, tiny bit selective about some of what they choose to reveal online too, I know that ours will never fit perfectly into the holy mold of any typically blogged-about family. We don’t buy our son’s toy weaponry ourselves, but he does own an orange cap-gun that he uses to protect himself from pretend zombies because we let him watch The Walking Dead with us on AMC once in a while. When he’s of age he’ll join his dad on trips to Canada where he’ll learn to kill and cook a deer himself, with the help of other men in the family because it’s a tradition started by my in-laws that we value. And even though I don’t like my kids being a walking ad for cartoon characters (especially because we do strive to keep them disinterested in the T.V.), Matthew is shamelessly indulgent of anything Lightning McQueen and I’m too much a sucker for that unparalleled thrill on his face to shield him entirely from the occasional Disney spoil. Also, I don’t consider Apple Dippers from McDonalds a gateway drug.

That being said, we aren’t all that bad. Our kids watch less television than any other kid they know and they do more crafting, more thrill-seeking and more hands-on-experiencing (both favored and not-so-much; many have corresponding scars) because of it. We spend less time trying to keep them presentable and within the stringent confines of total safety -- and more time working up a sweat with them out in the backyard, in the kitchen or in the garage. Not one of my kids would eat a homemade chip of spinach and flaxseed if I paid them cold card cash to do it, but they eat fruit and vegetables for snack instead of packaged crackers - some of which they’ve even helped to grow or at least picked themselves. (Plus, I’m actually pretty good at keeping up with housework, which is something the general population of bloggers confess to not doing very well. I secretly give myself bonus mom-points for that.)

If it weren’t for the influence that blogging has had on my life I wouldn’t know that disposable diapers take 500 years to biodegrade in a landfill or that my kids have contributed to over two thousand of those each, or that cloth diapering has come such a long way from what it used to be that toddlers can practically change themselves blindfolded. I’d also have no idea that other mega-easy things like growing your own strawberries or making your own sidewalk chalk paint or throwing together applesauce from scratch weren’t at all “ambitious” by anybody’s definition, took less than five minutes of any real effort at all to pull off and would be responsible for a thousand quality memories I’ve shared with my kids. I strive impractically to have the patience of parents with one, well behaved child as apposed to the three less-than-cooperative ones that I do have because I’m reminded of how to do it everyday that I read what they write. (I would be stretching the truth if I didn’t confess that sometimes I’m a little put off by how effortless some of those women try to convey that it is because they can pull it off, but when push comes to shove, it’s an influence in my life that holds me to a higher standard, and I’m a stronger woman because of it.)

A lot of it is also just that when you sit down to write about what it is that you do, as a matter of course, you’re going to be more aware of it, reflect on it, and filter through what, in hind-sight, you’ve come to realize may not have been the ideal course of action. Whether you ultimately choose to ever post it or not, you're going to do it differently the next time around. Likewise, knowing that I may write about a particular scenario later makes me all the more conscientious of the choices I make within it.

There are a really wide variety of blogs out there, even within specific genres, like parenting. Of course, some blogs are meant to be a place of inspiration - a place like that is naturally going to talk more about success than failure. I'm not referring to those types of blogs when I say this... But the vast majority of parenting blogs out there pride themselves on being “raw” and telling about the life of a parent, the way it “really” is -- you’d expect that at least somewhere in that ever-expanding category of web logs, there would be at least a few tales of the classic swing-and-miss scenario that end up in a truly epic fail, but there rarely are. Even the most fearless writers seldom seem to go into anything that might stretch the shape of that perfect family mold. Their husband’s don’t tell dick and fart jokes; their sons have never picked up a stick and pretended it was a sword; and their school-age kids don’t learn to say curse words in Spanish from other kids on the bus. All mothers breastfeed their kids until the age of two and a half, even if they have to buy donated milk; they all claim to live on a budget, but buy solely organic food at twice the cost of it’s counterpart; they’ve never reprimanded their children without being wrought with guilt for days; and of course, they all cloth-diaper, share a single bed, and perpetually agree with their husbands on how much is too much to coddle their children.

I don’t exactly reside in the slums of my state, and not one family I’ve ever met in my life looks anything like the average one I read about on my blogroll twice a week by authors who claim to tell the good, the bad and the ugly in equal part. I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to feel a little swindled. Who could blame them though? Being a mom is competitive biz.




I’m really curious about this one. How has writing about your own life, or reading about others, influenced your style of parenting? Are you selective about what you write (as am I, admittedly), or do you fear nothing and expose it all?

Fixing Up The El Camino.

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This is actually Matthew in one of the old trucks Spencer bought purely for parts. The only pictures I have of the El Camino are Spencer and I kissing in it and that somehow didn't seem appropriate for this post.

I think Spencer made the decision like, the day that we found out we were having a boy. It’s no secret that (already having a daughter and having previously thought that no way, under any circumstances would he EVER be having more kids) he hoped for a boy out of our first pregnancy. He didn’t have baby fever, he had SON fever. So the day that we left the ultrasound back in 2007, Spencer got busy making all kinds of plans and one of them was to have Matthew help him fix up the El Camino, because someday it would be his.

Spencer is exactly the kind of father I always pictured him to be. I’m hard pressed to think of a thing in this world he doesn’t know how to do with his own two hands, which is something I’ve always been psyched for him to pass onto our son. He takes immense pride in being self-sufficient, so he hunts and fishes and gardens and knows how to grill anything he catches or grows so that it tastes delicious. He even taught me how to fry up dandelions and make ice cream out of snow. He buys cars just for the hobby of taking them apart and rebuilding them and he can put together a computer from the ground up. When I married him, he knew nothing about electrical work or plumbing and he’s since done all of both we’ve ever put into this house - which is a lot. We had carpet install once, and he watched every move that the people we hired made so that he’d never have to pay someone to do it again. Everything else we’ve ever done to the house, has been done by him (and not just because he’s cheap). He’s the guy at work that always gets the biggest raise in the shortest time because he can’t bring himself to show up less than fifteen minutes early everyday or to not work twice as hard as the best man he works with, or to tell who he works for that he deserves to be the highest paid man on the job.

There is a long list of things my husband does that do not impress me, a LONG list, but I have always known that he’d be an incredible father to our son, and he’s delivered.

Oddly enough though, Matthew kind of unexpectedly started taking more to me since I’ve been home, (while Scarlett takes to her dad) despite the ton of stuff they do together. Just last week they came back from an outing together, telling me he got to operate a fork lift, helping to put a new cab on an old pick-up. Matthew DEVOURS anything his father teaches him about trucks and fixing appliances and how to grill steak like a man, but he likes just as much to catch butterflies with me and wash dishes and paint with acrylics and learn math. He takes from us equally, right down the middle, but he is more affectionate, more open, and more tender with me. If we’re all spending time together, he’s wrapped in my arms or holding my hand. Anytime he spends with his dad is interrupted at least a dozen times for him to come pay me a hug and kiss and a very quick, syrupy sweet, “I love you, momma!” as if he’s afraid I’ll forget it while he’s by his father’s side.

(Scarlett doesn’t know how to be delicate about her favoritism like Matthew does, so she just throws all of her weight from my arms, screaming DADDY! DADDY! DADDY! like a crazed lunatic the minute her father steps within earshot of anywhere we are.)

A few weeks ago over breakfast, we decided that Matthew’s old enough now to start really helping Spencer out around the garage. It’ll be good for both of them, we agreed. Right now Matthew vacuums his bedroom, he puts his own clothes on their hangers after they come out of the dryer, he feeds the cat daily without ever having to be told, and he wheels up all four garbage bins every Wednesday afternoon. Some of the best bonding that we do is over little necessities around the house. It’s time he start learning how to do things I don’t know enough about to accurately describe on here by name.

After we watched John Carpenter’s Christine together, (an 80s horror flick about a supernatural muscle car that possesses it’s owner and kills people, even without a driver) Matthew has been ALL the hell about it. There is nothing more badass to that boy than an old, red muscle car.

So yesterday, Matthew had the option of either going with me to the grocery store or staying behind and helping Spencer organize the garage. (My husband, by the way, is neurotic about his garage being clean. After his near-death crisis in September, he decided that life was too short to keep putting off all of the things that he loves most, so everyday after work I give him time to be in his garage for a while before he has to come in and “be dad” for the night. (We call it that jokingly; Matthew is usually in there with him.) 90% of what he does is obsessively organize his tools.) I kind of expected this to sound like no fun at all to Matthew, but he decided to stay.

When I got back, Matthew was wiping down the El Camino with a car duster inside the garage, AC/DC wailing over the surround sound and booming through the rafters. “MOMMY! Daddy said that I get to HAVE this car when I get bigger!!” he beamed. “He actually said,” he started, taking a more serious tone, “that I could choose: this or the truck. But I want the cool, red car!”

For a minute, I was love-struck. My little boy, taking after his dad, learning how to be a man, covered in filth and smelling like gasoline with a big ol’ shit-eating grin on his face. The palpable masculinity of it all was just too darling for my little Mommy heart to take. I scooped him up and squeezed him over the long, broad striped hood of the car, but he broke free.

“YEAH. I’m ‘onna be all like EEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR! EEEERRRRRRR-UGGHHHMMMMM… SCREEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAACHHHH!!” he screamed, ridged arms jerking wildly back and forth as if steering a pretend car on a murderous rampage. “It’s gonna be AWESOME! I’m gonna name her CHIRSTINE! ”

I’ve never coddled Matthew, especially when it comes to letting the innate boyishness in him go wild on adrenalin-filled dreams. But I’ve got 14 years until that car becomes his and I am already terrified.

At least it’s not a motorcycle… At least it’s not a motorcycle…

The Kid Who Never Sleeps.

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The other night Matthew had his first sleepover.

The day after Matthew’s sleepover, his friend’s mom calls, she says that she feels bad for him. She doesn’t think that he slept at all that night. He wasn’t defiant or afraid. He didn’t even make any noise. But she had to stay up until 1:00 in the morning checking on him, waiting for him to fall asleep. We don’t know for sure if he ever even really did. He was already awake by the time his friend’s family woke up.

That was after a day at the zoo, where he walked around (off and on, since we had the double stroller with us) for six hours on a hot day. This was after a long drive back and a big meal and a cozy, warm bath with bubbles once we got home. This was with his favorite pajamas and his stuffed puppy. Still, for hours after his friends went to sleep and the house was dark and silent in the middle of the night, he laid there, trying noiselessly to wind down. His buddy’s mom even laughed because he eventually told her, “I don’t need anything. How come you keep checking on me?”

I laughed. Don’t feel bad, I told her. That’s just how he sleeps. In fact, the rule in our house is that he’s not allowed out of his room before six. Before we did that, Spencer would end up making him oatmeal at 3:45 in the morning before he left for work, hoping it would help get him back to sleep (which of course, only energized him more). We have tried everything. His doctor even says “he just seems to run on less sleep.” It’s rare, but apparently, some kids do.

He’s not depressed. He’s not hyperactive. He doesn’t even seem distracted. I’m not going to say that he never seems tired or irritable during the day (sometimes he’ll even ask for a nap, without being able to actually fall asleep for it - he hasn’t napped on a regular basis since he was two), but he has an outstanding memory and great coordination. In that way, you can’t even tell that he’s running on such little sleep. He’s not allowed to even sniff a soda (try as he might to sneak sips whenever he can), and I can’t let him watch T.V. because he just can’t ever handle having it turned off without winding up punished. He doesn’t play video games and he gets ample, ample exercise throughout the day because he needs it; his energy is generally through the roof although he’s capable of concentrating well enough to know that he definitely isn’t suffering from hyperactivity. He has a regular bedtime and he doesn’t even fight us on it, so it’s not that he refuses to go. He readily lets us know whenever he’s tired, he enjoys resting and he wakes up refreshed.

I told her that for as long as he was old enough to climb out of his crib we’ve had the issue of him meandering through the house all hours of the night, looking for things to do because he was “bored”. When it didn’t wake us up, we’d get up in the morning and find the kitchen stool pushed against the counter, the snack cabinet door hanging wide open and packets of animal crackers and pretzel crumbs covering the tile like sawdust on a shop floor. His dad and I were terrified for the longest time of him choking or falling and breaking his neck while we were none-the-wiser, unconscious a floor away.

We’ve considered sleepwalking, we’ve considered night terrors. But when Matthew learned to talk, we figured out quickly that neither one of those is the issue. He can have pretty vivid (even frequent) nightmares, but he’s told me time and again on sleepless nights that he had no scary dreams at all.

Because I’m a light sleeper I’ve been roused some nights every hour, first listening to him fill a cup with water, then get up to go to the bathroom, then fill a cup with water, then get up to go to the bathroom, then fill a cup with water… We cannot let him sleep in our bed with us because he literally never stops moving.

So at his four year check up yesterday, I brought it up to the doctor. This is our second time talking about it, but the first that he really asked me anything back and didn’t assure me that it was probably a phase. It’s a good sign that he doesn’t seem to show evidence of any other strange symptoms, but he may have to see a neurologist in the future, especially if he starts complaining of headaches or any other odd pains.

I think that he’s fine. I really do. Besides maybe having a weak stomach and middle toes on each foot that criss-cross over one another, he’s healthy as an ox and on it’s own, his weird sleeping habits aren’t really cause for concern. But the idea of him needing neurological testing down the road, even just to rule out something improbable is unsettling to say the least. I’m trying not to blow this into something bigger than it is, but I wish I knew more about it.

Getting Jipped Out of Pictures.

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I am pretending not to care that my bangs are clearly not behaving themselves. Please pretend with me.

I started a Flickr account yesterday. (I know, I’m so hip to the times, right? Keep up, people.) I don’t have a face book, so I figured this would be a nice way for family and junk to actually see picture of my kids unrelated to blog posts. (Especially since not everyone reads my blog.) (And even if they did they’d mostly see pictures of Styrofoam crafts and the penmanship of my four year old, which are pretty much my favorite things to photograph anymore. God, what happened to my life…)

So far I love it, my little flickr account. The only thing is that I suddenly have knowledge of the fact that I possess, like, five pictures of my husband and I, FROM OUR ENTIRE MARRIAGE. I have a bunch of honeymoon and wedding pictures obviously, but I was really looking forward to gathering a tangible collection of memories from our day-to-day life - you know, Easter barbecues, forth of july picnics by the pool, bonfires in the fall… not a thousand and two moments from the same, one day. We do stay busy, so I know that we’ve had a katrillion opportunities to take pictures of ourselves actually enjoying marriage. Plus we used to be really good about it. But I guess having a slew of kids that generally do more interesting things (you know, like wear stuff and breathe oxygen and yawn cute) will do that to you.

On that note, am I the only mom who apparently only deems herself worthy of getting a photo taken when she’s pregnant? What’s up with that? What the heck am I skipping out on all the good Easter candy for if there’s only ever going to be evidence taken of my existence when I’m busting through maternity shorts? I mean, do you even know how cheap a bag of Kit-Kats are at Walgreens right now?

The other day Spencer and I were perusing through the zoo with the kids when we walked by a couple of adults that were taking pictures of themselves holding their ice creams together. “People take the dumbest pictures of shit before they have kids,” he said tastefully. “Psh. I know, right..” is what I said back. (See first paragraph. Rest assured I’m aware of the hypocrisy.) Seeing my lack of photos now though, I get it. (Take your weird ice cream pictures childless people… Someday it will be all that you have.) Seriously though, I don’t want to look back on our marriage and only remember the good times we had before morning sickness changed my life. I want to remember the good times we have as parents most of all. Together. And if I can't get that, at least let me have a few pictures of myself on the days I get a good blow-dry.

I’m guessing this is a pretty common issue for married folk with kids (or animals for that matter) because it’s pretty rare to see pictures even on photo-savvy family blogs of anyone’s husband unless there’s an anniversary to talk about. So what about you, internet? Are you any good at remembering to immortalize more than just your kids when you’re trying to capture “family” on film?

I want to work on that, because last I checked, I vomited myself into a state of dehydration that required hospitalization making some of the kids you see up there. And what ones I didn’t I’ve certainly sacrificed for in other ways… like, you know, with my sanity, and/or obligation to share my more expensive hair products with. And my husband, well... he just makes a picture look good. I don’t want to brag, but we kind of play a pretty big role in their existence and survival. I think we should share in some of the documentation, don’t you?

Stressed.

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Heaven help us. 

At the restaurant after the zoo this weekend, Scarlett wreaked havoc. When she was happy, she was climbing on the table and tossing bits of chicken over our booth onto another family’s seat. She was screeching and diving over our laps and busting her chin on the table with a noisy CLANK that got everyone’s attention and spilled water all over her dad. When she was unhappy, she was throwing silverware and spilling things on purpose and crying at the top of her lungs and falling again, making her tongue actually bleed this time. Mary and Matthew were hard to keep under control in all of the commotion and difficult to please even when they were perfectly poised. We were barely finished when we high-tailed it out of Famous Dave’s, complaining the whole way back about how we’ll never be able to eat out again until Scarlett is at LEAST two and a half.

When we got back to the house, I immediately scrubbed Matthew down, combed his hair to the side, packed him an overnight bag and very eagerly sent him down the street for what would be his very first sleepover at a friend’s house. Spencer and I made a big deal of it, hugging him and taking a few pictures and teasing with him about how he can’t be big enough to have sleepovers already -- he’s still our teeny-tiny baby boy! But secretly, as we held his hand up the sidewalk to their house, we were thrilled. When you have three kids, getting one of them safely out of your way for a little while every so often is big break. And we have no qualms about commemorating the occasion that someone throws us a bone and gifts us with a little time off.

Especially at a time like this. I don’t know if it’s three simultaneous growth spurts at once or what, but recently, the kids have just been running circles around us.

On Sunday the neighbor called saying that he was fine to just spend the whole day over there. Matthew knew that once he went home that the sleep-over would technically be “done,” so every time his friend’s mom asked if he was ready to walk home, he’d say “No, not yet.”

And that was fine with me. By noon, I’d raked two bags of old leaves out of the flowerbed, weeded it, watered it, and trimmed the hedges; I moved out hundreds of individual pond rocks from in front of the garden and pulled out the grass and clover patches growing up underneath; we’d gone shopping for new spring plants and lawn mower blades, filled the birdfeeder, then weed-whacked, trimmed and mowed the lawn. We hung out for a while with one set of neighbors who were painting their shutters black, and some others who were fixing their fence. Then Spencer got to work hacking off parts of one truck to add onto another in the backyard and I was literally left with nothing to do. Not one thing.

By one-thirty I realized I’d checked on the baby six times toward the end of her nap, just waiting for her to wake up. Every ten minutes I was back in the house to see if she was ready to eat lunch, and then come outside to play. She slept for an extra forty minutes than she usually does, which happens from time to time. The difference was that today, I wanted her up. For the first time in longer than I can remember, I was actually bored of not having to keep my kids in line and entertained -- even with “better” things to do, like sit out front and paint my nails.

The universe has kind of a natural tide to it that way. It tends to make things tougher, just when life's getting a little too easy, and then lets it up on you some when it's all starting to get too rough. Matthew’s already hanging out at his friend’s houses without us needing to follow him over and stay to chaperone. Half the time we’re having to coax Mary into spending more time with us instead of her friends and even when her friends are over here, they’re caught up in her bedroom the whole time, talking on the phone with even more friends. And Scarlett takes two long, solid naps a day. Get this: the other day she even ate an entire bowl of SOUP without spilling much more than a few small drops. In a ton of ways, each one of them is getting easier.

I missed Matthew so much that I almost cried when I carried him home. All of his weight was resting on my forearms; his lanky legs wrapped around my waist, arms draped over my shoulders and weary face pressed into my neck. It made the walk feel longer, but there wasn’t a fiber in my body willing to put him down.

That night after visiting friends, we ended up going out to eat again. We were all fed and completely finished when the waitress asked in broken English if we were ready for the check, probably looking forward to getting a little sanity back her section of the restaurant.

“No,” I said. “Not yet.” And instead of rushing out, we sat together -- while Scarlett begged for kiwi just to spit it back out onto the floor, and Matthew cried for more pizza even though he hadn’t finished what was on his plate because the very thought of someone else getting the last piece at the buffet was just too much for him, and Mary told him repeatedly to stop being things that we’ve told her a million and a half times are politically incorrect to say. We sat. And no, it wasn’t perfect, but it was worth hanging onto.

Dear Scarlett,

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The other day you sneezed while I was changing your diaper and clear as day you said, “bless you!” to yourself. I vowed to get it down as soon as I could, but before that happened you told me that you loved me for the first time ever. “I love you, bug.” I said, as always.

“Ahguboo.” you said back, smiling.

Everyday I unwrap you a little bit more, like a mystery gift encased in a sequence of boxes. It’s the best part of being home with you guys. I learn so much about your brother and sister everyday that it’s staggering. I’m learning about how they shoulder responsibility and how they carry themselves in uncertain situations - but I feel like I understand, at the core, who they are because in a large sense they’ve already grown into themselves. I feel like I’m still learning that with you, holding your hand while we figure it out together. It is such an honor to be that person in your life.

Speaking of people in your life, can we just talk for a minute about how in love you are with your dad? It isn’t just that you shower him with attention, either, it’s that you literally come alive when he gets home, like his face charges your batteries in a way that no one else can. You talk more when he’s around, you act sillier when he’s around; you shadow him like a faithful dog and comment in gibberish on everything he does and says, whether he’s talking to you or not. Happy as you are throughout the day when he’s at work, seeing the comparison makes it seem almost as if every moment leading up to the one where he walks though that door is spent just waiting for him. He is your best friend, and you do not even try to do me the courtesy of hiding the fact that right now, he is your favorite.

Believe me, he eats that shit up, too.

That isn’t to say that you don’t love everybody else though. I know that when you’re older one of the things about your babyhood that’ll always stick out for us is the way that you have never feared strangers. I mean, not even at the most basic level. To this day, if a friendly stranger offers you a passing grin, you immediately reach for them, expecting to just be handed over. You hug other parents on the leg who you know are not us, you’ve even kissed people sitting next to us before. If you are anything, child, it is affectionate.

At one point it concerned me enough to research a little and to speak to your doctor about, but it turned out that as long as you were connecting well with us, it isn’t any sign of developmental dysfunction or you trying desperately to escape from the family or anything. And you do connect with us perfectly. (I don’t know if you’ve heard, but you told me that you “gub” me the other day!)

You are gibber-jabbering up a storm now. You repeat almost anything that we say with a good deal of clarity and once in a while you’ll even pipe up with a spontaneous and appropriate word on your own. Yesterday, you pointed up at baby Charles while he was in my arms and said: BABY! The day before that you pointed to pizza coming out of the oven and said: PEET-SEE! And when you see animals you almost invariably mimic their distinguishing sounds. Your meow?: SO FREAKING CUTE, by the way.

Favorite words nowadays: Pizza, phone, Daddy, Matthew (you say Matthew PERFECTLY), circle, ball, three, binky, nigh-night, monkey, color, baby, bubbles and outside. You pretty much spend every minute that you’re inside, begging to be taken out since the weather warmed up. I LOVE that you’re a lover of the outdoors.

A few fun facts about you right now:

Bubbles make your world go round. Not just soap bubbles. Any bubbles. Every time you watch me fill a pot with water, you LUNGE for the water foaming up at the end of the stream and squeal: BUBOOOOS!!

You won’t let ANYONE wield a bubble wand but you, even though the only thing you do with it is dip it into the bottle and then suck the soap off.

When we’re at the park, you tend to gravitate away from the play equipment, wandering off into open grass instead. I like to call you The Wanderer.

Whenever Matthew's outside without you, you climb up the back of the couch so that you can stand on the windowsill, hands pressed against the glass, calling: Matthew!... Matthew!...


When you get mad you instantaneously reach for things to either yank at violently (like someone’s clothing) or to swipe to the floor (like a plate of food or a bunch of stuff sitting on the coffee table). You don’t screech and make a big scene, you just purse your lips and do it, totally dignified. It’s like the equivelent of tossing wine in someone’s face. I love it. (No I don’t.) (Okay, yes I do. But I still correct you for it.)

Speaking of getting pissy, you are already giving the silent treatment. The other day I was holding you and Daddy took a stern tone with you for screeching. You immediately turned your head away from him, eyebrows indignantly high, and rested your chin on my shoulder. When he walked around, trying to get you to look at him, you turned the other way, looking as far away from him as you could. CLASSIC.

You are so much fun though.. One of your favorite things to do is jump on Matthew’s bed with him while his CD player is blaring. I made him turn it down yesterday while you guys were doing this. He whined. Then you walked up to the button and turned it up as loud as you could. I pretended not to see when he high-fived you for it.

Your new thing now is spitting raspberries at people and things. Then you throw your head back, laughing wildly at yourself. You think you are hilarious.

You are pretty much the shit at putting together puzzles. I’m just sayin’.

You fake laugh at things all the time. You even make it a competition. You’ll fake laugh at something. Then we’ll laugh louder. Then you’ll laugh even louder than that. And we’ll go on and on like this until you’re slamming your hands down on things and screeching at a fever pitch that no one else can reach.

You’ve learned now that it is usually in your better interest to turn from people who ask you to hand things over to them, and run away, saying: Nooooooooo! instead.

Your first bubble bath was a total fail - you hated every second of it and spent the entire time either trying to escape from the foam or wipe all of your bath toys clean. Now? You refuse to bathe without them. The other day we were out of bubblebath, and when I plunked you in the naked water you were very vocal about your objection. Conveniently, you ended up taking an enormous poop in the water which took me about thirty minutes to clean up. I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt on that one, but I think you and I both know what went down that day.

　

Clearly, you are still one of the coolest kids ever and you are only getting awesome-r by the day… even if you do occasionally poop in the bathtub. I love you to piece and pieces and pieces, munchkin, forever and ever and ever. Amen.

A Right of Passage: The Holiday Where Everything Goes Wrong.

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Yesterday we finally decorated our Easter Eggs. Yup, two days after Easter.

Don’t get me wrong, Easter turned out great for our family… But only after about a good 12 hours of completely anarchic disaster threatened to make us swear off ever celebrating another holiday again. EVER.

When our usual plans changed, Spencer and I thought it would be fun to host an “easy, little” Easter Egg hunt for our nieces and nephews on my side of the family. That actually went off without a hitch and was super-fun, but every second leading up to it was a total disaster.

But actually, now that we’ve survived the apocalypse that was Easter 2012, I kind of feel like we’ve graduated through a right of passage in a way. You know… to have at least one holiday where everyone involved wants to strangle each other immediately prior to gathering before God and barbecue in appreciation of all that they have? Yeah, that one.

They may not be our proudest moments, but we all have them. They are all part and parcel of even the happiest family dynamic: The occasional holiday throw down.

I remember watching an episode of… I don’t know, maybe it was The Wonder Years or something, where the narrator talked about how every big event put the family through utter hell, all in the name of forcing togetherness and fabricating good times. I don’t have as many disaster stories from my own childhood as some of my friends’ families do so I think my family was at least comparatively pretty chill, but I do remember one year on our way to Dorney Park, when my big brother got so mad at our mom that he tried to jump out of a moving vehicle just to get away from her. (His girlfriend was in between him and the door, my dad had to swerve the car.. you can imagine there was some yelling after that.) Of course it’s just something we laugh about at Thanksgivings now, but at the time it made for a pretty catastrophic afternoon.

Nobody jumped out of a car this Easter, but all of us yelled. All of us.

　

Looking back on the pictures this year, I am astonished at how effortless it all looks, even still. Isn’t that always the way? The kids all look like a million bucks, nobody’s forcing a smile, and you couldn’t have special ordered more perfect spring weather for an outdoor egg hunt and barbecue by the pond. I knew that the pictures were only going to show the best parts of the day, and as I flipped through them I half expected to think to myself that they told some kind of a lie… that they’d paint a picture of a day it only looked like we had, instead of the one we actually did. But instead what I saw were a lot of awesome moments that were part of a day that we did really have, even if maybe I was a little too fragile at the time to truly appreciate it.

It’s no big deal. We’ll work at it, and hopefully next year will be just as nice without all of the dysfunction leading up to the main events of the day. (I never wanted to be one of those families that spoiled every family vacation with a bunch of bickering, and I still don’t.) But really, when all is said and done, it’s the good things we’ll fall back on to remember anyway, and the reality is, you can only expect so much peace when you’re raising three kids and one of them thinks it’s funny to poop in the garage just to see what’ll happen.

So you know what? Who cares if Matthew’s sick sense of humor compelled him to pull down the pants of his 3-piece-suit to take a shit in the garage fifteen minutes before we needed to leave? Who cares if the kids went to bed at 10:30 and still never got to decorate the Easter eggs we’d been promising them they could for four days? Who cares if all of the kids woke up before we even had the chance to hide the baskets, and were miserable as a horse’s ass for most of the day because of how inconveniently little they slept? Who cares if plans got confused and we missed church, and we missed breakfast with mom-mom, and our slow-cooker ham for that evening dried to the flavor of stale bread while we were out? Sometimes, that’s just life. You get through it and you move on. And you decorate the damn eggs a day late.

　

　

I can’t speak for the kids, and I can tell you: I did NOT have this much clarity on the situation two days ago, BUT I feel good knowing that it’s not the batch of cookies getting burnt (which actually got eaten anyway - go figure) that I’ll remember when I think back on this year’s Easter calamity. It’ll be that because we were pressed for time, Mary baked Oreo cupcakes for the first time entirely on her own, and that they were a huge hit!

In a few years when I think back to it, I won’t sulk over the enormous meltdown Matthew had mid-hunt because eggs kept falling out of his basket. I’ll remember that every.single.one of his cousins donated eggs of their own, just to cheer him up. (And it worked!)

It’s not going to be the little bit of extra money or time that went into filling each one of a hundred some-odd eggs with little trinkets, candy and quarters that I remember. It’ll be the way all of the kids’ faces lit up as they cracked open their basketful of surprises, and the way they all traded together, decorating each other afterward in stickers, stamps and tattoos.

I’m not going to look back on this year someday and scowl because Matthew never got that haircut he desperately needed, or because he had a black eye from that scuffle he got into with his friend the day before… or even because we had to change his clothes three times and run an extra load of laundry before we left for the picnic (as very, very frustrating as those things were to me at the time). Nope. I’m going to look at these pictures year after year as our family continues to grow and the only thing I’ll be thinking is how perfectly handsome he looked, learning how to skip rocks into a patch of spangling lilly pads on an Easter afternoon, wearing grass-stained khakis and a necktie. Nobody pulls that look off better than him.

And it won’t be the squabbling with my husband over time and plans and money and discipline and WHOSE FAULT IS IT REALLY THAT THE COOKIES GOT BURNT that I’ll remember from this year’s Easter, but the way he took my hand in the middle of the park while we hid plastic eggs together for the kids, kissed me on the head, and told me that I’m awesome.




What will you remember from this year’s Easter?

Her Name.

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We don’t really rely on nicknames around here as much as I’ve noticed that some other parents do.

I call her Scarlett Rebecca as often as I think to because honestly, I just love her name so much. I don’t know if it’s really as flawless to everyone else as I think that it is, or if I just can’t help loving it this much because, well… I picked it, and it belongs to her. But even before she made it what it is, I’ve always thought that it was just so rich, so strongly feminine, so fun to say. It’s pretty for a little girl, fun for an adolescent, strong for a teenager, and really… I mean, downright sexy for a woman, don’t you think? It’s not vapid, but it has a timeless quality. I like to think it’s the kind of name that will stand the test of time.

Then again, I guess that’s what we all think when we settle in to name out kids. And there are still plenty of people out there who hate the ones they were saddled with.

It’s always a toss up with these types of things. I have no idea what Scarlett’s true tastes will be. She may grow to adore her name, the same way I’ve always been lucky enough to really enjoy mine. Or she may completely detest it, the way that Mary dislikes the combinations of her first and middle name (-- which, can I just say?- boggles my mind. I think the combination of Mary with Morgan is the most adorable blending of sounds I’ve ever heard. I always tell her I could not have picked a prettier, more suitable name for her myself.) But, it’s all relative. I remember so carefully picking a sailboat theme for Matthew’s first nursery, only for sailboats to wind up being probably the only thing he never took a particular interest in.

In any case, I’ve found more recently, as she grows into her personality that the nicknames are fast invading my every communication with her.

Scarlett Becky.

Scarly Beckerson.

Piece-a-pie.

Bugger-boo.

Boo-butt.

Scar-bar-banana-head.

Scar.

Barla.

Nugget.

Buggy.

Goose.

Cornball.

Nut.

Lovey-bug.

Doodle-butt.

Scooter.

And pipsqueak.

Some of them don’t even make sense. I keep catching myself calling her a nut-ball. I can’t even picture what a nut-ball is. It just sounds like it describes her when she’s walking around here being… you know, a nutball.

Still. When I see pictures like this, where she just shines without even trying, I look at her and I think: Scarlett Rebecca, yeah. That’s her.

A Day of Recouping.

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Their baby.

My baby.

This week has been a little rough on everyone.

I’d spent the past two days helping my friend labor through the birth of her baby (an INCREDIBLE experience, by the way!) which meant, of course, that things around here were not taken care of in the usual way. The little ones, who were with their grandparents, hadn’t seen me for two days and Mary, who I made it home for only to put on the bus and to make sure she was fine to stay at a friends’ house until I was finished, barely had, either. Spencer went into work, still recovering from his own painful procedure, got off really late and still had to help get the kids from my mom because the baby wasn’t actually able to be seen until after 7:30. I did manage to get the necessities taken care of around the house (and to spend a little time with each of the kids) while she went in for her C-section, before I saw the baby… but I came home afterward positively beat.

Still, when I woke up on Thursday I was actually looking forward to filling up on mommy-and-me time with the kids. We’ve been shipping them off to sitters a lot recently, so I had this whole great list going on in my head of things we were going to do to make up for lost time. A walk through the trails. A picnic at the park. Holiday crafts and some card-mailing once we got back to the house for Scarlett’s afternoon nap.

Then Matthew came down with a bit of a bug instead -- There was a hint of a fever, but nothing we haven’t seen a katrillion times. (Here’s hoping he’s at least building up an arsenal of immunities so that he doesn’t get sick so often once he gets to school next year.) So our ambitious, outdoor plans were a bust; instead it was sick-day activities on the couch and Spring Cleaning while the kids lay refreshingly unconscious at the same exact time -- not once, but twice in one day.

This may sound a little cruel to those of you who are better mothers than I, but that my friends? Was kind of a good day.

Why We Don't Vacation. (Not That I Wouldn't Love To...)

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Far and away the most challenging part of raising a family our size (especially at the ages that we do) is fostering the web of interpersonal relationships it’s comprised of. Spencer and myself; myself and Mary; Mary and her father; (Mary and her biological mother, when that’s even possible); Mary and Matthew; myself and Matthew; Matthew and Spencer; Matthew and Scarlett; etc. etc. etc. It’s important that as their parents, Spencer and I have time alone as adults, time together as a complete family unit, one on one time with each of the children individually, and even two on one time, where both of us get to bond together over chummy conversation or an exclusive, special activity with one of our kids at a time. That’s a lot to keep up with before you even factor in family extending beyond our immediate circle.

What makes it most difficult is the same thing that I’m sure makes it most difficult for any family; the killer combination of money and time and not having enough of either… you know, the age old battle. Only for us, it feels like we have an unmatched sense of priority toward the two which makes it all the more difficult to figure out.

We’re consistently at odds, trying to figure out: which is the bigger priority right now? Expense, or experience? He stands firmly on the side of money ALWAYS being the biggest priority, whereas I take an “all things in moderation” sort of stance. I don’t feel like we’re being bad parents by not running our savings into the ground for a family vacation all of our children won‘t even remember in a year and a half, but the thought of spending money just for the fun of it doesn’t give me an aneurism.

I bring this up because we’ve been talking Disney World recently. We have three kids at 3 very different ages. Going now means that two of the three children we have won’t remember most of the trip past the age of maybe three and seven. Going in even just a few years means that Mary will have forever missed the opportunity to see Disney World through “kid-colored glasses,” begging the question, will it ever be fully worth it to go?

To first understand what a big deal this is for us, you have to first know something about Spencer… He’s an absolute mastermind at saving money. But asking him to part with any significant amount of it, especially “just for fun” is IM-freaking-POSSIBLE.

Spencer and I live so far within our means that we’re regularly made fun of for it, even by our own parents. We make a good deal more than the house we live in or the way my husband frets over every expense would lend one to believe. Spencer isn’t happy unless four hundred dollars a month is being poured into a savings fund that is untouchable under any circumstances and we’re paying a significant amount more than we’re expected to toward the principal of the mortgage on our house. To put it gently, my husband is the penny-pinchin’est son of a mother you will ever meet in your life. And it drives everyone nuts. If it weren’t for my putting up an argument about it each year, things like birthday gifts and Easter baskets would be sternly deemed a totally unnecessary expense - he takes it that far.

To be fair, him being as disciplined with our money as he is will be the reason we retire early (God willing) and the way in which we’ll have the house paid off before Scarlett gets to college. It’s what we have to thank for the fact that after his unexpected accident, we lived for three months without an income and had to change nothing about the way that we live. Not even Christmas. But Mother of God, it sure can be a buzz kill sometimes, too!

I love the fact that he’s as responsible as he is. I do. Where our beliefs differ is in the priority that experiencing life to it’s fullest extent actually is, especially when we’re talking dollar signs. Is it really worth setting our retirement fund back four grand for a family vacation all of our kids will never simultaneously be at an ideal age to ever even go on? Honestly, probably not. (After all neither one of us went as kids and we’re not completely dysfunctional.) But when you’re dealing with someone who puts so little stock into holidays as you do that he refers to even holiday expenses like Valentine’s Day as a “consumer circle jerk,” it can be really hard to lend a sympathetic ear to his opinions on monetary priority when it comes to fun.

(Spencer is a very fun guy, don’t get me wrong. He’s just a very firm believer in the philosophy that fun should not cost a cent.)

I feel like I’m always saying, They’re KIDS, for Pete’s sake! Buy the damned Easter grass and stop being such a cry baby about it, would you?? While he feels like he’s always saying, Why wouldn’t a teenage girl want to repurpose a potato sack into an outfit for the school dance? Doesn’t she feel like a sheep walking through those overpriced shopping malls with her friends?! I know I did, even at her age! (Which, bless his soul, is probably true.) In the end, both of us are left wondering why we never get through to the other when it comes to this One. Blasted. Thing.

“I want to experience things,” I finally leveled with him the other day. “It’s not just about the kids. Life is short… We learned a hard lesson in that this year. Look, we knew when we decided to have kids that we wouldn’t be traveling the world anytime soon, but I want to look back on the time that we had together whenever it’s over and say that we lived a life worth passing onto our children. If the world isn’t worth exploring or enjoying, why did we ever bring our kids into it?”

Then of course, yesterday, (because that’s just the way the Universe works when you put your life into writing) I was hit over the head with one of those moral revelations that put it all into perspective for me.

　

………..

　

Yesterday my friend went into labor and invited me to be a part of the delivery. Coincidentally it was the same day that Spencer was scheduled to have a blood clot filter (or as he put it: “something that looked like a device from Total Recall”) removed from the center of his body through a vein in his neck -- a follow-up procedure from his accident 6 months ago. Both events were taking place at the same hospital. After his procedure and somewhere around my very pregnant friend stalling at 3 and a half centimeters, I met Spencer for All-You-Can-Eat Tacos at Don Pablos… Just the two of us. It was one of those very, very rare occasions where the kids were at my moms until the next day, Mary was still at school (Thank You, Detention), and we actually had a little time to kill. For the first time in what felt like way too long we had a lot of exciting things to talk about beside the monopolizing stuff we can’t agree on.

By the time I’d gotten back to the hospital to be with my friend, he’d rented a special movie (too scary to ever watch with me and the little ones around) for just he and Mary, his first true love, to enjoy. When I got back home around midnight, Mary was sprawled out next to her dad on my side of the bed, the two of them fast asleep.

I couldn’t help but feel like maybe it was a bit of a God-Wink. A little something to remind me that the fact that we chose this path together doesn’t have to mean that we’ll never bond the way we could have if we didn’t. Our children aren’t going to grow up not knowing that we love them unconditionally because we chose to save for their college education instead of fly them first class to an Orlando resort before they hit their teens. Spencer and I haven’t come to some miraculous, foolproof epiphany about how to splurge and when to save 100% of the time. But yesterday I was reminded that even if our family scrapbook is filled with more pictures of peanut butter pinecones, lunch dates over nachos, and anecdotes about a father-daughter movie-night than airplane tickets, it’ll be no less worth looking back on.

There is no shame, after all, in celebrating a simple life.

(At least until we retire in Honolulu.) (KIDDING.)
(My ass is definitely retiring in Disney World.)