Hello, God. Are you there?

Jack, not wanting to go to bed: "Mom, why do bats get to be nocturnal?"
Mom, too tired to be serious and just wants the kids to go to bed: "Well, that's a good question to ask God someday, honey."
Jack, exasperated: "Uh, Mom, that's not even possible. God can't get a text message. He doesn't even have a phone!"

Oooookay, clearly we need to talk more about WHY we are praying three or more times a day. I mean, I thought I'd made it clear, but obviously...well, clearly I haven't.

Me and Eve

I wish I could say I found this uplifting bit myself, but I confess, my friend Emily sent me this with a note that read, "I thought you might like this sentiment." I read it, re-read it, mulled it over and decided it was the most brilliant thing I've read in a while. Eve chose to be a mother, to know good and evil and hardship and trial over Eden. Would I make a different choice for an easier life, one where my kids didn't scream at each other through dinner or get sick or argue with me or...or... I suppose I'm with Eve on this one.

That is a lovely thought after a long day, isn't it? Check out other inspirational thoughts at Hopefully Mormon.

President Updoor

Tonight, before bed, Jack looks at Bob and I and says, "Mom and Dad, you know about President Updoor, right?" "Updoor?" we said. He nodded sincerely, "Yeah, I like President Updoor."

Ohhhh....you mean Uchtdorf, as in Dieter Uchtdorf, second counselor in the presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Yeah, Jack, your parents dig him, too. Here's a taste of Jack's apparent new favorite apostle of the Lord. I love this man.

P.S. I have a lot of things I NEED to blog about. Bear with me. I'm sure I'll get to it. Someday.

Shhhh!

Don't tell Bob.

I cut the boys' hair. Both of them. Clippers, scissors...right there in the living room (vacuum on hand to clean up the mess). Bob is particular about their hair and trusts the clipping only to George, the world's kindest and best Sicilian barber. But George is 30 minutes away and with two boys and a daddy, he gets a bit pricey. Granted, I've made a few horrendous mess-ups on Jack's hair (which George tolerates and shakes his head when fixing), but I'm getting better.

So much better that Bob didn't notice. I'm not going to say anything to him.

And he doesn't read the blog. So, shhhhh.

Kindergarten!

I want to know how the baby on the left became the school boy on the right:




Jack started kindergarten last week. I scarcely believe it's true. It is the biggest cliche in the world, but...wasn't he just born? I tell you, I am sure missing him around here. It's only been, you know, 3 1/2 days of school, but our home and routine just feel different with him gone. The salve to this lonely feeling is seeing him get off the bus each day just electric about how the day went. He has stayed on "green" for good behavior every day. He likes gym class. There is already a girl in his class that he likes (Leah. He has requested a play date. Further, do childhood crushes start this early?) He has requested I do not pack green beans for him to eat because "everyone" will see and it is so embarrassing. (I'm sad that vegetables are embarrassing.) Finally, when, Mom, does he get to eat cafeteria lunch? (If by "lunch" they mean the rotating mess of junk food they presume children will only eat, then, uh, maybe once a month.)


He never went to preschool, has never been gone for home for such a stretch of time (8 a.m. - 3 p.m.), yet he is an absolute natural at school. His response so far to "How was school today?" has been, "Awesome. Totally awesome." If I'm shipping my baby off for someone else to teach for seven hours, I can't ask for much more than awesome.

While I'm at it, when did these two Mount Morris Central School Students grow from 4 months and 12 years old to being a kindergartner and a Senior?

(I swear Jack was thrilled when the picture on the right was taken. It was on his first day of school and we were going on another building tour. When he saw Sophie in the computer lab, much of his aprehension vanished. He waved her every "I Love You" and "Thumbs Up" sign he could muster. I think just knowing someone he loves is in the same building every day did wonders for his nerves. The picture just doesn't reflect his true joy.)

Good luck, this year Sophie and Jack!

Potatoes and Apples and Flowers and Ice Cream and Kids

I'm having one of those months.

I am just not dealing as well as I'd like, emotionally, with the loss of 2/3 of our income. Bob is looking for other work to make some of it up (anyone need a middle-aged, white male, award-winning columnist and radio show host for anything, let me know...) but finding a second job in a time frame that leaves at least 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. open is a challenge. So, if anyone has loss-of-income tips that don't include saving for a rainy day (a debt-reduction plan half completed, slashed tires, new tires, a few other emergencies, a necessary vacation took care of that...), I'm open to coping techniques. I find that I'm not as up for the challenge as I thought I'd be. The feeling of not being in a position to really help is discouraging. The idea of giving up being home with my children is mentally debilitating (plus, I haven't been able to find a job that would allow me to afford to put Robbie and Ellie in daycare. Sheeze...) All in all, losing a job when you have a family -- I suppose in any situation -- simply sucks.

But in the midst of that, I had today. Today, we went to our country land (which I hope we can afford to keep) and we had a picnic and we shot a BB gun at a cardboard target. The kids love to shoot and run up to mark the spot where they hit. We hiked up into the woods and played and enjoyed ourselves. And for some reason, Robbie thought it was the funniest thing in the world to yell, "Hi, Bob!" to his dad over and over. We tried to grow a garden out there this year, but the ground was way to clay-ish. Almost NOTHING grew -- except potatoes. I wish we had just planted potatoes out there. Digging into the ground and watching the bounty come to the top of the earth, watching little hands pluck red and yellow potatoes out and squeal happily as if they'd found gold was priceless -- and convenient as I was out of potatoes and we eat them a lot. And oh my! The ground stinks, but the worms and nightcrawlers love it and my kids love to play with worms, worms, worms!!

When we came home, Ellie came outside with me to "help" me rake up loose apples, talking my ears off. We gingerly tested the new apples from our loaded Red Delicious tree to see if they are ready to pick. I'd say one more week and we'll be saucing! I ran out of homemade applesauce about a month ago (50 quarts was not enough...) and I'm chomping at the bit to make some more. Since we switched to homemade last year, my children refuse to eat the stuff from the store. I suppose that should make me feel good. Well, one more week or so and we are back in action.

I love flowers. My grandmother, Mary Lou, the one who essentially raised me, had a green thumb for flowers. You see many of her favorites in the things I plant. In fact, she gave me the irises that bloom in April and May. I've been splitting and packing them from house to house for more than 10 years. So, today, Ellie was chattering about all our pretty "roses," so I sat her down to tell her the proper names. I couldn't help flash back to being a little girl myself, pestering my grandmother to learn the name of this pretty thing and that pretty thing. Couldn't help but think of her patience as I would pick her pretties to bring in the house even though she preferred them outside. I remember twisting the world "dahlia" over and over in my mouth, thinking it sounded very exotic for our little town. Even in picking apples, I thought of my grandmother. She had an apricot tree that was something of a miracle in the high Great Basin desert. Naturally, the best apricots were at the top. Naturally, being tall, young and agile, I was sent up the tree to get the very best before the blasted birds -- whom she loved in every situation except when they ate her fruit. And then I can hear her in my mind giggling at me, then laughing and saying, "I wish you could see yourself." And I growled at her because I was picking them for her! How could she laugh at me? Apricots haven't tasted the same since. Ellie munched her apple happily. And at least she figured out that the roses are on the side, the dahlias and petunias and mums and marigolds are up front with some shallow-rooted sunflowers leaning a little too far to the right. Good-bye lilies and gladiolas and day lilies. See you next year tulips and pansies and irises. Keep spreading out little hens and chicks. I like your cheerful ground cover. I need to get a few more late summer things to keep the bloom up. And if I could just have a wild yellow rose bush, my grandmother would all but be there in the yard with Ellie. Except they get as big as a house in a desert. I can't imagine how one would grow here. I miss her lots. Flowers are a way to remember. And they won't yell at me to pull myself together. She would have. I certainly could call her now, sob my worries into her ears if she hadn't been gone from this fair earth for eight long years. And she would probably say something like, "Whining isn't going to do you any good." Practical. Loving. Sigh. I've got flowers, but I miss her.

And then we wasted a precious $11 to go to Bob's Dugout for one last hurrah to summer, a little more soft serve swirl and uber large grasshopper pie/black raspberry mix for Bob. Because even though it's all going downhill, ice cream -- even expensive ice cream -- makes the world feel better. And Jack starts kindergarten and we need to get serious about going to bed early. I swore that would happen last week, and yeah, right. There is always one more chance to jump on the trampoline, one more run up the sidewalk with Ben. One more pick-up soccer game in the neighbor's back-yard with ten children of various ages -- pre-teen girls bossing the universe and a couple two-year old's obliviously running wild with a whole pile of kids in the middle. Sometimes, it's too hard to stop the fun for sleep. Sometimes I watch them and am loathe to stop the play that helps build their brains. But sleep eventually calls. And I need to get serious about it. Tomorrow. The day before school starts. Sigh.

So, it's rough. And life's like that, I suppose. And in the midst of it, you have potatoes and apples and flowers and ice cream. And kids. And I guess that will have to be enough.

Unless you know of anyone needing a top-notch conservative radio talk show host. Why, then I'm all ears...

A very, very big blessing

I've had one of those days where it's hard not to see God's hand in how it all played out. I've been grateful all afternoon that despite they day being inconvenient, being a big change to my planned week, being much more expensive than planned, at the end of it, we're all alive and healthy.

Let me back up a couple days. You might remember that I had Lasik surgery on my eyes. When they do that surgery, the slice a flap in the cornea before the laser the eye back to good vision then put the flap back over the eye. Over time, that flap heals. Tuesday evening, in a freak accident, Ellie threw her arms around me for a piggy back ride at the same time that I moved my head and her little finger nail ended up slicing across the front of my eye. As it turns out, one of the two, sharpest, non-medical instruments is a child's finger nail. She could have punched me in the eye and it would not have hurt that corneal flap, which was still healing from the surgery. But she caught it in just such a way that it wrinkled the flap, causing me some pain, discomfort and slightly blurred vision in my right eye. The eye docs at Robbins Laser Site got me right in, put a therapeutic contact on my eye and told me to come back Friday so they could see how the eye was healing.

This isn't the end of the world except this doctor is an hour from my house. And I have no family around to leave my children with to run such errands. And I had planned to go pick $1 a pound blueberries on Wednesday, which I moved to Friday, which I've now moved to Monday and will most likely have to move again. And we're going to North Carolina next week for Bob's family reunion so I have a million things to do. A three-to-four-hour detour to Webster every couple days with my kids just wasn't sounding fun.

So, today, I left my kids with my neighbors. I've mentioned them before. They are pretty incredible. Our kids play great, and I know in their home there is nothing that my children wouldn't be exposed to that I wouldn't approve of. I trust the care of my children to them entirely. After my eye appointment today, I was gassing the car up when I had a feeling that I really needed to have our van looked at before we left next week. I chalked this feeling up to a mental reminder of everything I needed done, grabbed my cell phone and called Patrick Pontiac in Henrietta -- a car dealership Bob does ads for and whose service department is absolutely excellent. I asked if they could look at the van next week. They told me they were completely booked, but asked if I could get it in right then. Ugh, I thought, but sure. I called Josh and Kelly to ask if it were ok that I would be a little late so I could get an oil change and have the van looked over. Naturally, they figure the chances were pretty good that my kids would be involved in some sort of game of Star Wars make-believe at their house whether I was there or not. So, I took the van and Josh kept the kids so Kelly could go run some errands.

I bought a book to occupy myself ("The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud" of which I finished 220 of 270 pages) and waited and waited and waited. Finally, the service guy came and told me one of my front tires had a puncture wound (not knifed like Bob's, more like a run-in with a curb that I don't remember) and they were surprised it hadn't blown out. The other front tire was cracked. The van had no other major issues that I wasn't aware of, but the tires were a big deal. I knew I probably needed new ones soon, but wow, that bad? I felt grateful that I'd felt the need to stop and that they could work me in.

Probably around the same time, my little guy decided for whatever reason to pop a rock in his mouth. Josh heard him coughing, and wondering why he would suddenly be coughing after a day of perfect health, checked on him to find him choking. Josh picked him up, beat on his back and got the rock out. When I got home, Josh told me about it right away, apologizing that he didn't watch him better and that they didn't usually have little things like that on the floor. He didn't want the kids to tell me that he'd beaten on Robbie, but he had hit his back to get the rock out. All I could think of was how grateful I was he was with Josh, a state trooper with a tour each of Iraq and Afghanistan under his belt. Josh knows how to handle emergencies. All he could think of was that I'd be upset that the boy choked, and all I could think of was how grateful I was that Robbie was with someone who could handle the emergency and save him. If not a rock at the Bacon's, it could have been a Lego at my house. I wonder if I would have been as effective in saving Robbie's life.

So, I kind of think God had his hand in my day and I'm grateful. I sincerely think the Holy Spirit whispered to me to check right away into getting the van looked at. I don't think the people really had space in their schedule to fit the van in, but they did anyway. And I got to sit and read a book. And my son was with someone who could protect him today in a way that maybe his own mother couldn't have. I gave my kids extra big hugs tonight. And they hugged me back -- safe, warm, wiggly, alive little bodies who God protected today.

I can't help but be very, very grateful for those very, very big blessings.