Little Disciplinarian Pearls of Wisdom

I need wisdom. This is no ordinary boy and yet he is just like most boys. Stubborn and doesn't want to listen to his momma. I could beat my head against a wall or try and figure out what he really needs and what will work best on him.

Like a splash of cold water on a morning crusty face this pearl dropped in my lap.

The morning went something like this. Mind you I haven't even made it to the kitchen yet...
The boy pushes the baby girl in his sly way. Boy gets disciplined and while sitting on his bed crying in time out I say, "Get dressed and don't leave the room until you are." Getting him to dress himself is new he is kind of clumsy at it and he ultimately ends up with the trains on the back instead of the front.
But even getting the shirt on was such a battle. So I am mad and I haven't even started breakfast yet.

Enter the pearl. Don't pile on the ultimatums while serving out a sentence. Let him do his time and then once he is a "happy boy" again start making deals and giving the newest order.  I realized I do this a lot, pile on the tasks in the midst of tantrums and timeouts. It only adds fuel to the flames.

The Parable of the Man with 2 Sons also came to mind. (Matthew 21: 28-32) Dad told his son go out and work in the vineyard and he said "no" but later changed his mind and went and did it. He told his other son go work in the vineyard and he said, "yes" but then didn't do it. Jesus asks, who did what God wanted him to do?

The first one. It just took him awhile to see the necessity of obeying his father. I think my son is like this. Eventually he will do it, eventually he will pick up the blocks the question is how much breath will I waste asking and repeating myself until he finally gets that he has to do it. A piling on of commands and requests doesn't end up in a job well done... so I am finding this little pearl to be a beautiful thing.

Sing-a-Long 2

Last Thursday, I put on a youtube music video to clear our heads and put us in a good mood because it was a long day. So, I choose Chris Tomlin's Angel Armies song which is my "go to" song right now. I pushed play and started to walk out of the room and my little singer says, "Come back Mommy I want to sing with you." That is so much easier to say yes to than being asked to play trucks, trains, tractors, cars.... So we sang and Rosie bopped on her legs and clapped her hands. We praise God and I prayed this song over my babies that they would always know that the God of Angel armies is by their side.

Even now in preparing this post I played the song again and he - who had been fighting me on naps the last 2 weeks- emerged with an "O" and started singing. The sweetness of singing this song with my boy just fills my soul.

Love Mercy

So my mom watched the kids so I could go to the spa for a cut, pedicure and massage. HA just kidding I went grocery shopping but going alone is like a spa treatment just a lot cheaper. Anyhow, when I got home she said that if my son is half as bad for me as he was for her then he is "just like you were." I have heard that before from her and it was cute when it came to climbing on things. I was climbing fences at 18 months I could expect nothing less from him. He is a boy of course he wants to climb on things. They didn't have crib tents when I was that young but if they did my Mom could have used one. All that to say we are both stubborn to a fault and fight the wrong battles and find ourselves wishing otherwise after awhile.

He is fighting the battle of "I don't want to be a big boy/ I don't want to try." I am fighting the battle of "Knowing which battles are worth fighting." I kind of feel like we are butting heads all day everyday and by the time I go to bed I feel like I haven't loved my little boy well enough. I feel bad. And I am tired and worn out and want to eat peppermint patties and drink wine - just not together.

So the word mercy has kind of been rattling around in my brain the last few days. I could use mercy from him and I think he could probably stand a little from me. Mercy.  Maybe we could make it through one day were I don't constantly drop the F-bomb in my brain.  I mean seriously there are &#^^@ in all the thought bubbles over my head.

So anyway I looked up the good old "love mercy" Micah 6:8 verse and was a little surprised how fitting verse 7 was for me.

 Micah 6: 7-8 Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,

Ten thousand rivers of oil?

Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,

The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

8 He has shown you, O man, what is good;

And what does the LORD require of you

But to do justly,

To love mercy,

And to walk humbly with your God?

My anger, my inability to cope or react better, my lack of inconsistency, my lack of mercy and lack of reliance on Jesus to help me in all things is giving my first born up for learning the same damn things.  I might as well as be burning him on some alter. I am pretty sure God won't be pleased with  my children being the victims of the sins of my soul.

I know this. I have known this.

So why is it still so hard to put into practice? What does God require me to do with my firstborn (and the second born too)-to show him what it looks like to do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God.

Fighting Battles

A good mother lost her fight to cancer in June. She was someone I had known most of my life. She and I had worked together. We happened to see (on TV) the 2nd plane fly into the Twin Tower on 9/11 together. She was always opening my eyes. She left an indelible mark on our hometown and is greatly mourned.

If there was one thing I know about her, she loved her children. She no doubt battled cancer everyday, for years, so she could have one more day with her kids. Of this I am sure. One more day...

Thinking about her made me think of my own "battles" and how they hardly compare. What are my battles? Trouble getting up in the morning, doing dishes, playing trucks when I don't feel like it, fighting lonliness or fretting about money. What are those battles compared to cancer!? Yet, all my battles take away the joy of mothering or make it more of a challenge or they are a distraction from focusing on the really important things -like being the best mom my children deserve.

I still find myself shaking my head and saying, "I can't believe she is gone."  Yet, even in her death, she has opened my eyes again. Children are worth fighting our battles for. Hopefully, the vast majority of young mothers (me included) will not have to fight the battle she did. Potty training, picky eaters, waking up to nurse 2 times a night -still, loneliness these will be our hard battles but they will be worth fighting everyday to overcome so they won't affect us negatively. So we can keep on enjoying one more day with our children, offering them our best self.

Keep Calm & Cope

I had to look up what all those "Keep Calm" pins and pictures were that you see all over the Internet. It's pretty interesting and not quite what I thought. You can read about it here. I don't feel like trying to reinvent the wheel because I still haven't done the breakfast dishes and will have to start dinner shortly which I am sure will coincide perfectly with a sweet red head in search of momma milk jugs.

I will explain this, good old hubby who is usually never wrong was telling me that there were 2 types of people who in P.O.W. camps. Those who believe "tomorrow is the day" and those who cope with today and then also plan to cope with tomorrow. More often than not the ones who didn't survive were the ones who kept saying, "Tomorrow they will come for us." The ones who survived best learned to cope.

Yeah yeah,

The last few weeks I keep going to bed thinking maybe tomorrow will be better and here lately things are melting down before breakfast is started. We waste so much time battling for small things like making the bed, pulling down your own pants to use the toilet, don't sit on your sister that there isn't energy left for anything fun or even just necessary - like doing the dishes. So by 8:40am I am already thinking, "Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe tomorrow I will do a better job."

I told him that and he reminded me of the P.O.W. camps. My great-grandpop was a P.O.W. during WW1, I've heard a story about the time he ate a cat, I think he must have learned to cope. I mean - he ate a cat! So what's my cat? What do I need to swallow that might not be so great to do or think about?

Well, I yell, because of this my son - he yells. I want to see this cycle end before we teach the little one to yell. She can already climb so can you imagine a climbing yeller - this scares me! I have been trying to refrain but not doing a great job. One particularly rough day, posted a couple motivational reminders around the house "Keep Calm & Stop Yelling" "Do Justly, Love Mercy, Walk Humbly with God, Use restraint, speak kindly, COPE."

Let's see if that works for a coping mechanism. I hope.

For the Record

As a writer one of the things I ALWAYS struggle with it timing and chronology. I would love for things to be written chronologically. It just doesn't always work out because sometimes what I write is a process that I need to keep going back to tweak and sometimes I just haven't learned my lesson well enough to finish writing what I started. Blogs in the normal form don't help as the newest post is at the top and you might miss out on some prior detail unless you ready from the bottom up. So I will let posts sit in the drafts folder for month or weeks, then when I go to publish something the chronology is just all wrong. All this bothers me. You may not notice it but I do!

So for the record. I surrender there just isn't much I can do about this. I can change tenses in sentences and sometimes I do but the internal struggle to publish things in order is just something I need to get over. So there you go. I have 5 posts scheduled for the rest of the week. They are what they are. They are not necessarily in order and they didn't just have happen last week. They are weeks and months in the making but they are out of the drafts folder and that to me is an accomplishment!

My Boy

He is all boy.

What else is there to say?!

Sing-a-Longs

It was something akin to a car seat commercial or Volvo commercial… because that is what we drive. Both kids strapped in and ready to go and the 3 year old asks, “Can we listen to Curious George?” “Sure!” The familiar song starts and and he starts to sing –mostly the last word of each line because that’s all he has learned yet. We are both singing – I know a few more of the words than he. His sweet voice fills the back seat and makes me look in the mirror to see it happen. The boy who had no interest in clapping so that he was like the last baby to clap now sings along with Jack Johnson, Daniel Tiger, Boz the Green Bear and Thomas the Tank Car it really is the cutest thing! All this running through my mind cue the appropriate line of a song:

“Upside down
Who's to say what's impossible and 

can't be found
I don't want this feeling to go away”

Don’t let this sweet feeling go away, the one where we are in harmony and enjoying this sing-a-long.
At the very least remember it mom. 

Remember it.