Today was Maggie’s blessing day. When children are born in my faith they are given a name and a blessing. It is a special occasion, as it is a once in a lifetime event. Many special blessings and promises are given to the child from their Father in Heaven. As a mother, I am deeply touched by these exceptional insights. They reconfirm how precious and sacred my children are, and what unique individuals they are. The blessings given to my children are all of the things that I want for them.
I know that God and Jesus love my children and I am so grateful to them for sharing them with me. This opportunity for motherhood gives me the chance to learn so much. I know that God is a loving Father and that we are all His children. When I think about how I feel about my babies, the intense adoration and almost undescribable level of gratitude I have for them, and know that I would do absolutely anything to protect them and keep them safe, I can begin to see how it is that my Father in Heaven would send Christ to die for us, because of His great love for me and for you. I cannot fully comprehend how much He loves me, but through the love I have for my children, I can begin to understand. What a perfect gift.
Motherhood teaches me so much every day. When my life is aligned with how the Savior would have me be, those simple lessons transcend everyday knowledge and become very profound and deeply spiritual lessons. They buoy me up in low moments and remind me of who I ought to be and the sacred calling that motherhood is.
As I listened to the special gifts given to my sweet daughter today, it is my deepest hope that I might live worthy of the amazing person who she is. I am so humbled that God would trust me with His dear little girl. I am truly blessed.
Posted by Lou on January 30, 2005 @ 9:48 pm | 0 Comments
My parents and I took the kids on an adventure to the BX today. I say adventure because anytime you venture out of the house with small children you have to look at it from the adventurer’s point of view or you’ve lost before you’ve started.
The first five minutes in the store went well. Then Maggie woke up and began to cry. As soon as I picked her up, I found out why. She had a serious poop-splosion and it had shot all the way up her backside turning her outfit a lovely mustard color. I hadn’t thought to restock the diaper bag since yesterday’s adventures, and I didn’t have a spare outfit on me. We very quickly perused the baby section for something suitable to change her into, then my mom handed me a twenty and I dashed to the register and bought the little, yellow sleeper we chose. I then ran to the restroom and began to change her.
I quickly discovered that I had no baby wipes on me either (you’d think I was one of those amateur first time mommies), so I used wet paper towels to clean my daughter. She is, of course, screaming the entire time at the indignity of being naked and cold in a ladies restroom of questionable sanitation. Meanwhile, we are attracting quite a bit of attention from the over sixty crowd. Every granny in the restroom had to peer adoringly at my screaming infant and then look at me questioning my competency as a parent (and seeing as how I forgot both a spare outfit and wipes it was a pretty legitimate concern). I am acting as calm and collected as I can feign under ths kind of scrutiny.
Finally, she is de-pooped and I just need to rip the tags off the little sleeper, unsnap the snaps, and wedge my failing baby inside of it. This sounds really easy, doesn’t it? Well, those snaps are the industrial type. They don’t just unhook easily. It is very definitely a two handed job. So while the grannies all stare, I juggle the baby and the sleeper with the super glued snaps. I’m sure I was quite amusing. They probably thought I was one of those wackos who steals a baby from it’s pram, then changes her clothes and hair color in the restroom and disappears into the crowd.
Then this saint of a woman enters the restroom, sees me struggling and offers to help me unsnap the blasted sleeper and dress my squalling baby.
With a little assistance, Maggie was clothed in a matter of seconds. The other grannies busied themselves washing their hands and adjusting their graying hair. I’m sure they were secretly staring at me out of the corner of their eyes to see if I would drop her on the way out. Which I did not, thank you very much.
I return to the BX and find my family. We shop for a few more minutes then my son fixates on a Buzz Lightyear toy that is far too advanced for a two year old. Being the typical two year old that he is, and since it is an hour past naptime, he has a total meltdown. There is no reasoning with him when he is like that. He carries on for about ten minutes before we decide to get the heck out of dodge. As soon as we hit the checkout isle he calmed down. There was CANDY in the isle. He hands me a pack of Starbursts quite placidly for someone who looks so tear streaked. I ask him if he is ready to be calm now. He is. So I tell him to go ask grandma if he can have the treat. Since he is expressing his want with composure instead of screaming with his head spinning around Exorcist-fashion, he gets the treat.
My parents decide to check out the Commissary on their own while I took the kids home for a nap.
I got Jonas in bed and sat on the couch with Maggie on my lap. Suddenly, she makes an extremely forceful and loud poop. She still has the newborn startle reflex so her little arms fling out to the side and her eyes open wide. She looks up at me in absolute shock. And I busted up laughing at her.
Posted by Lou on January 27, 2005 @ 9:46 pm | 0 Comments
Today I put on a shirt that was completely clean. I pulled it out of the dryer when it was still warm. It was a beautiful twenty-seven seconds.
At that point, my darling bundle of joy missed the burp cloth covering 98% of my person and left a big trail of warm, sticky baby cheese down my front. This has become an almost daily occurrence, so I’m used to it. It’s not even a good enough reason for me to change my shirt any more. Eau du Sour Milk may not be my fragrance of choice this season, but it’s what I’ll be wearing.
Posted by Lou on January 26, 2005 @ 9:44 pm | 0 Comments
We visited the San Francisco Zoo this week. It is open again (it’s about time) and the remodeling has done absolutely wonderful things for the facility. The animals look happier, their habitats are bigger and more natural, it’s easier to see the animals, and I got in free because I went the day after Chinese New Year, and it just so happens that this is the year of the Rooster, and I was born in the year of the Rooster.
I love to visit the zoo. It is wide open with fresh air, nifty keen plants with little tags telling me what they are, and poop flinging chimps. When Chris was in the first six months of his Air Force training, Jonas and I went to the zoo frequently. At the time, Jonas was a young one year old and pretty oblivious to most of the animals. I suppose when your view of an elephant is only of the beasts knees, it isn’t very interesting. We spent most of our time just running around or getting butted by goats in the petting zoo. I remember once a goat butted him so hard he knocked him flat on his back in the saw dust. Being the good mother I am, I laughed at him. Now he is a big two and a half year old. It was so awesome to take him to the zoo after not going for a year and seeing him see the animals and see his responses. He pointed at the giraffes (my favs), laughed at the flamingos, and stared pensively at the gorilla for about five minutes, which, in Jonas time, is like an hour. He had his face up against the glass and the gorilla sat there, about two feet away and looked right back at him. I wish I could read minds so I could know what they thought of each other. I’ve rarely seen Jonas study anything with such intensity. The moment felt very profound, although I’m still not sure why, or what the exact word describing what I felt was. In simple terms, it was just very cool.
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Posted by Lou on January 25, 2005 @ 10:14 pm | 0 Comments
My parents are coming all the way from North Dakota for a visit. It is time to meet the new grandbaby. We had a hard time scheduling this trip. You see, I was due on January 17th. But my due date doesn’t mean a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. I’d gone early the first time, and certainly the fact that I was on bed rest was pointing toward an early delivery this time around, but you just never know what nature has in store. I’ve heard of women who were on bed rest for months having to be induced at 42 weeks. So we had to plan carefully. This week looked perfect because it was after the due date, but not so far past it that if she came early she’d be all grown up already. We wanted to keep the ‘new’ in newborn. Amazingly, it worked! Maggie is five weeks old, still wearing her preemie clothes, but she has woken up to the world enough to be interesting and not just cute. Perfect timing.
This visit has spun me into a cleaning frenzy. Last week I cleaned out the laundry area, swept the floors, mopped, vacuumed, scrubbed toilets and the bathtub. I organized, and got rid of the pesky piles of contraband we’ve confiscated from our two year old and put in amazingly high places that we hope he can’t reach. You’d think it would be somewhat clean here but I have an extremely messy son, and we’ve all come down with a particularly nasty cold that has kind of wiped me out the past few days, so the house went to seed again.
Now we are all doing last minute clean sweeps of the various rooms, trying to promote a sense of hospitality without too much time being involved. It’s a We’re Glad You’ve Come To See Us, But Please Don’t Look To Closely kind of welcome. It’s not that we aren’t putting forth an effort, we just realize the futility.
Every improvement we have tried to make has been carefully undone by the darling grandson. I mopped the kitchen floor today. I even got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed the spots you can only see, well, when you are on your hands and knees. I used up almost all of the cleaning solvent to make it really shine. Real attention to detail cleaning. As soon as the floor was dry and the mop and broom put away, and I had moved on to another room that needed my attention, Jonas got thirsty. Instead of asking me for a drink, he asserted his independence and dropped the brand new, 64oz bottle of orange juice. When I saw the mess, he handed me his sippy cup and said “Uh-oh.” Then he dropped to his hands and knees and started lapping it up like a dog. Good thing the floor was clean.
Chris is upstairs working on Jonas’ room, otherwise known as the guest room. He made the beds and put all of the stuffed animals on the top bunk all sitting up neatly, instead of tossed randomly around the room, which is how Jonas prefers things. He put all the books back up on the shelves too. Now he is standing guard over them with a broom. Jonas has been sent back downstairs quite a few times.
Tonight we will put Jonas to bed, then do a few last minute things. As soon as we get up in the morning I plan to sweep, mop and then leave the house until Wednesday morning when we pick you up at the airport. Seriously, we are going to my in-laws so Jonas can trash their house and spare ours.
Now, I do know that my parents love me unconditionally. They know me well enough to know that my perfectionism doesn’t extend to my surroundings (they saw my room as a teenager- my home as an adult is a vast improvement). They have also been the young couple with small, destructive children, so they have got to understand. I didn’t grow up in a home riddled with pristine sterility. It was comfortable and lived in, just as any real home ought to be.
So why do I want the house to look good? I am a mature, responsible adult who pays her own bills (ok, Chris pays the bills- but I made the budget!), cooks the meals (we had yogurt and Andes mints tonight), and who has given birth to not just one but two grandchildren.
Deep inside, I still want my parents to be proud of me. I want them to think I keep it together and am doing pretty well. I don’t want to be a worry to them; I want to be a credit.
Posted by Lou on @ 9:39 pm | 0 Comments
Ahhh. Naptime. I live for naptime. It is actually better than bedtime because come bedtime I am too drained to appreciate it. Somebody up there must really like me because I have both of the kids down at the same time. While that is the goal every day, I must say it doesn’t happen very often.
At the hospital they tell you to sleep when the baby sleeps. It’s a nice thought. I always have trouble getting there. Most days I don’t even manage to lay down, let alone sleep. You see, I have to cram a whole days worth of activities into the hour and a half that naptime is. If I have any hopes of a balanced meal - it will happen during naptime. Likewise, any hygiene activities that are above and beyond the boot camp style shower I spend one minute in every morning will have to happen now. If I want to do anything that is more enjoyable than taking care of basic bodily functions I could possibly do that during naptime as well. I just have to remember that it needs to be an activity that can be instantly shut off and cleaned up in about 3 seconds, or I am going to have a situation on my hands when the kids wake up.
Take scrapbooking, for example. I could realistically haul out my scrapbook supplies and work on a lay out during this hour and a half. But the second my 2 year old wakes up he is going to be tearing up the paper, putting sticky fingerprints on the photos and running around with my fine point, extra sharp scissors, or coloring on the walls with an archival quality marker. If I didn’t manage to get the page I was working on completed I am going to have to put it away amid all of this hullabaloo, totally interrupt the creative process, and pull it out the next day- only to find that my sleep deprivation has made it impossible to remember what my original plan was, so I will be starting over from scratch anyway. Not a very tempting idea.
It is much safer to stick with the less productive, but ultimately smarter, activity like checking my e-mail or watching a slightly more risqué than G-rated DVD. I can’t pull out the actual adult movies because if I do that, my son is bound to wake up, sneak half way down the stairs and watch as millions of people are blown up, or worse, somebody drops the F-bomb. Then, even though he is a late talker and only uses his words under extreme pressure, the F-word will become his favorite phrase and he will use it in front of his grandparents and at church. He will shame me in supermarket lines and point out to the entire world that I am unfit to be a mother. So, no. Nothing more offensive than PG can be shown while they are napping. It will bite me in the butt.
During those times when I do attempt the aforementioned ‘sleep while the baby sleeps’, trying to fall asleep is nearly impossible. I have a 100 mile an hour diatribe in my head.
Me: the dishes are filthy and the ants are going to be everywhere if I don’t clean the kitchen right now.
Me: go to sleep, don’t think about it.
Me: was I supposed to call so and so about the whatzit next Sunday? Oh no, I totally forgot. . .
Me: just sleep, the kids are going to be up any minute now.
Me: I’ll lie and say the answering machine must have missed the message or Jonas deleted it. . .
Me: tired. Want to sleep.
Me: yeah, lie, Lou, then you can burn in HELL
Me: would you shut up! Just Shut Up! SHUT UP! SHUTUP!!!!
At which point I usually find myself getting out of bed and retreating to a safer activity like my internet message board. (I know you are wondering does she call so and so back or wash the dishes? No. That was all a ruse to get me out of bed.)
Anyway, I live for naptime. Even though, to be completely honest, I just sit here like a blithering idiot.
Posted by Lou on January 24, 2005 @ 9:36 pm | 0 Comments
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