Why reinvent the wheel? Here are clips from my journal over the past two weeks. I'm too tired to sift out individual story lines from the journals to make separate blog posts for them, so it's all-in-one. Warning readers that "it's long" seems redundant after ten years of writing on this blog. Think of it as nine posts in one--nine journal entries:
Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Jay's school excuse of the day: we finished reading On the Banks of Plum Creek together at LAST this morning. It was good, as always, and the kids were happy to hear the ending. We barely made it to school on time afterwards! While we were getting jackets and shoes on after the story, Jay said "Let's do something that they do in the book today." He paused and waited for me to ask "what?" then continued, "let's stay home from school!" BAHAHAHA, Out of that entire book full of adventures and stories, he focused on how they got to stay home from school during the winter. HAHAHA! I almost wanted to let him stay home for his cheekiness.
Thursday, October 19, 2017
9:12pm. Amber sucked me dry with her destructive mischief this evening. I'm done with the day and don't want to write about it. We had our piano tuned and it sounds so much better now. Amber destroyed everything she could climb and reach whenever my back was turned. The end.
{that was the entire journal entry for that night, haha}
Monday, October 23, 2017
9:03pm. I finally embraced Halloween today and got our trick or treating candy plus some candy corn and costume accessories for the kids. Every year I put Halloween off as long as possible. I don't like the decorations. I prefer my autumn leaf light garland over tacky witches and spiders for fall home decor. I have seen some more...classy Halloween decorations, but I don't love Halloween enough to get them. We still haven't hung up the paper pumpkins we made a few years ago, but on the way home from piano lessons we stopped at Goodwill and got the rest of the kids' costume stuff.
Anyways, this morning my friend and I ran six miles on the bike path with our strollers. It was pleasant, jogging along chatting with a friend.
This afternoon we went to the Kannaleys' house to pick pumpkins. They grew such a big pumpkin patch! And they gave pumpkins to the entire ward primary and still had leftovers. We snagged six pretty pumpkins (Jeff picked two) and then lined them up in our front yard for a picture when we got home. Maybe next year I'll manage to take our traditional family pumpkin picking picture at the actual pumpkin patch. I wonder when we'll have time to carve the pumpkins...
Our yard has actual YELLOW LEAVES falling!
Pickin' punkins
Amber ran away when it was pumpkin picture time...
Jay and Amber, with plastic weapons.
Amber would not let go of Jay's new Maui's Fish Hook (part of his Halloween costume). That girl and her weapons.
Amber loves "punkins"
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
8:08pm. So exhausted: I made a year's supply of apple butter today. All in one day. 16 pints in freezer jars plus one last crock pot full ready to slowly bubble all night. It's a lot. I should've bottled it in jars instead of freezing all of it, but it sounded too hard after dealing with those huge batches of endless apples. I hope we have enough space in the freezer! If I thaw and discard my failure of apricot freezer jam we should be ok...
Wednesday, October 25, 2017
October has been busy-busy go-go-go, with a smattering of sicknesses scattered throughout the family that have all added up to low sleep count. That is life, but I still do not like how much more ridiculously difficult it is to handle the small daily obstacles when I'm tired. My composure/ability to be a nice mom slips most easily when I'm low on sleep, and during time crunches (e.g. getting kids ready for school) over the past week or two, I have felt like I'm barely holding it together by my fingernails.
I woke up this morning feeling kind of yucky, with a sore throat and throbby head. Before ascending the narrow steep stairs from my basement bedroom cavern to face the kids and The Morning Routine, I had my personal study time, which was a tad muffled by my various aches. I read "Repentance is Always Positive" by Stephen W. Owen. He said "While there may be undefeated seasons in sports, there aren't any in life. But Jesus Christ...gave us the gift of repentance--our path back to a perfect brightness of hope and a winning life." At the time those words didn't feel particularly ominous, although they did remind me in a friendly simply symbolic way how necessary it is for me to repent every day.
At the end of long days where I didn’t handle situations as well as I wanted to, my main feeling is one of defeat—the kids defeated me, or my impatience defeated me, or some annoying crumbs on the floor defeated me. I appreciated the analogy to sports seasons because it illustrated that defeat is part of the journey. Even though my brain understands the truth that there are no undefeated seasons in life, I still seem to want one. I keep fighting for that elusive undefeated season, even though dealing with defeat and other challenges is an integral part of mortality—one of the reasons we are even here on earth. The closest I will ever get to an undefeated season is a season full of both wins and losses, mixed with consistent, honest repentance and forgiveness.
Stephen Owen said "if you stop pedaling a bicycle, it will fall...This same principle applies to repentance--it is a lifelong pursuit, not a once-in-a-lifetime experience." When I read that I was already plenty aware of my need to repent of all my shortcomings, impatience, and exasperated asides every day. I said to myself: "Yes, that is a good thing to keep working on." Then I went upstairs to take on the day, not knowing how soon I would be tested on this principle!
It turned out to be one of those painfully all-too-normal mornings where nobody was on task getting ready for school and I was feeling more and more stressed about forcing kids along the later it got. We didn't have time to read a chapter of our current book before school which always makes me sad because that's such a positive, cozy, good way to send my kids off to school. Instead the morning was a harried hassle with a lot of demands from me and not a lot of compliance from them. My irritation seeped out in cranky commentary and the worst part was I felt bad about being irritated while I was irritated, but I was still irritated. Rose: I tell her to go get on her shoes, and she finds twelve other completely superfluous things to do before putting on her shoes. If I flare up and tell sensitive sweet Jay to do something, he scurries to comply with that one thing, but his lateral thinking is not great—he will often brush his teeth, but drift off to play in the playroom before I track him down to tell him to do the next job. It is all maddening. And then Amber pooped right when we were about to walk out the door, making our time crunch even crunchier in a stinky nasty way.
Even though it was my turn to say the family prayer today, I was not in the mood, so I asked Jay to say it once we were all buckled into the car (we have too many moving parts to say prayer when as many of those parts as possible aren’t buckled down first). Jay prayed for me and Amber to have a good day and for Amber to listen to me. Sweet boy. My conscience was pierced. Then on the way to school Jay's small voice came floating up to me: "I'm sorry we weren't helping this morning, Mommy." My heart twanged. Jay wasn’t even the main perpetrator in our anguishing-ly slow morning hassle, and he apologized anyways! The first step of repentance is saying “I’m sorry.” A mile or so later down the road, I took a deep breath and apologized to the kids for getting annoyed at them. It was humbling that even after my inspiring study of repentance less than two hours earlier, Jay still had to teach me about it on the go. Real life application of these useful, basic principles is not always the easiest or most obvious solution in the moment! [also: I’m pretty sure Rose was oblivious to the exchange, as usual, but sigh, oh well. She’s six years old. It will come.]
We took a school parking lot picture of a real life normal school morning where we barely made it on time and it wasn't graceful in any way until we started saying sorry. Saying sorry and trying to do better and be better helps. Real-time real-life repentance helps.
I wish the saga of today’s struggles stopped there, and I admit that I am tempted to stop there, but alas. Amber started throwing up just before lunch, and it was so stinky and gross and my absolute least favorite kind of mess to clean up. I was shuddering and gasping and groaning the whole time I took care of it. If you know me, you know that vomit is my number one nemesis for so many reasons. Thankfully Amber threw up in the kitchen. I didn’t know it was possible for a kid to barf on hard floor during the daytime, instead of all over the bed and carpet in the dead of night. So if a puke can be perfect, Amber’s was. Apparently there’s a slant to our kitchen linoleum, though, because when I was starting to clean Amber up, the “pool of sick” as my pal J.K. Rowling once called it, started seeping towards the fridge. I had to scramble to get Amber into the bathtub and then dash back to dam the flow and save myself from having to figure out how to clean barf out from under a giant heavy refrigerator! After some intense scrubbing and rinsing, both Amber and the kitchen floor were sanitized. I admit to a serious squeal and yell when at one point Amber grabbed my sleeve with her barfy-wet hand before I could stop her. GAG. Change clothes, start laundry, open windows (48 degree temperatures notwithstanding).
Thursday, October 26, 2017
9:34pm. Today was the last meet that Jeff's whole cross country team would run: the state qualifying meet in Yakima. TWO of Jeff's athletes qualified for state! Wahoo! I felt very proud of Jeff as a coach, and of the runners for their hard work. It was an idyllic fall day, with changing leaves, sunshine, and gentle temperatures. Tara Condie and I both wore black and red plaid shirts in an attempt at understated team colors. We were the team's superfan moms, decked out in Grizzly plaid! Haha, well her son made it to state so it worked. I felt more emotional than was strictly warranted from watching a couple of high school races without a single relation running. But the cross country VIBES were all over the park, and I cheered for the team. (even though I only know five of the kids' names!) I have loved being a part of that scene this season, even in my minor role as the coach's wife.
Poor Amby is still sick. It all started with MEGA snot on Sunday, then added in barf yesterday, switching to diarrhea today. The snot has stayed constant all week. I think she may also have gotten a fever today. She is subdued, although still all too willing to pester me when I'm paying attention to anything other than her. I was uncertain whether I should take sick her to the cross country meet today, but then decided that she could just lounge in the stroller if she was tired, which she did, then leaked poo all over the seat--poor girl.
This morning Amber woke up this morning and wandered out to sit at the kitchen table. I kissed her on the top of her head to avoid her snot crusted cheeks, and that was when I noticed that she smelled yucky. A closer inspection of my poor miserable little girl revealed that she had somehow pooped a liquid sick diarrhea that squirted up her back all the way into her hair. There was poop in her hair, hanging in her curls, and I had just kissed her head! I don't think my lips actually touched the poo, but it was a close call and I immediately put Amber in the bathtub. Poor girl! I stripped her bedding (it was fouled) and washed it for the second day in a row. Yesterday I washed barf out of it, today I washed poop. Close contact with poo puts me in a cleaning mood, so after starting the laundry load, I scrubbed my bathroom down so at least one room in our house would be sterile and bleached. Then I went up and sanitized the kitchen sink. And opened some windows to air out that sick smell.
The joys of motherhood kept on coming. After yesterday's challenges, responsible Jay got up extra early and was all ready for school by 7:30am. Rose, on the other hand, lollygagged and daydreamed her way through a 45 minute breakfast and didn't even start getting ready until 7:45am! I was busy cleaning and helping Amber during that time, so I wasn't aware that she was still eating breakfast until I came back into the kitchen and saw her. Impossibility. She blamed Jay for "distracting" her. Needless to say, we did not have time for morning story again today. On the way to school I had a very serious talk with Rose and grilled her into a commitment to stay on task while getting ready tomorrow. I also had her set consequences for what would happen if she didn't get ready in a timely manner: replace screen time with chores that afternoon. I hope she just gets ready. It should not take any kid two hours to eat, get dressed, brush teeth, do hair, and practice piano for 20 minutes.
Please, oh please, let Rose get ready on time tomorrow morning without a fight. I do not want to enforce those awful consequences at the end of a long day and an even longer week!
Amber and I picked the kids up from school on the way to the cross country meet, and saw Jay get his student of the month award.
Cross country races are my favorite!
Boys' start line with a ray of sunlight. The line had a space in it so the runners could go around that tree right in the middle.
Twins, only a foot different in height! I did a deep knee bend for our picture. We were cracking up at how far down I had to squat.
I think that I shall never see,
a poem as lovely as a tree.
--Joyce Kilmer
Costco dinner: always a hit.
Friday, October 27, 2017
9:35pm. Stuffy head. Jeff and I snuggled on the couch and talked for two hours after the kids went to bed tonight, and it was so nice. He's my best friend! We understand each other. We love each other. We care about the same things. Marriage is the best. We're coming up on 11 years this December!
Amber was a little less sick today. A tad less snot and fewer leaky runny poops. We stayed home all day after driving the big kids to school. At one point this morning, Rose was lying on her bedroom floor wearing nothing but shoes, socks, and underwear, crying because she didn't have any more pants. Any more of the comfy pants, that is! It was exasperating and hilarious all at once. That girl. We postponed Rose's piano practice to the afternoon and that bought us enough minutes to get out the door in time. We even finally finished reading the chapter we started on Monday! Today was only our second day reading all week. It's like Rose flipped a switch this month and suddenly getting ready for school is the hardest thing ever on the planet. Sigh.
Saturday, October 28, 2017
10:07pm. This morning I went on a chilly 5 mile run along the mostly drained canal. When I walked into our house afterwards, I was met with a flurry of activity. Jeff had corralled the kids and they were cleaning!! I didn't have to tell anyone to do anything! Jeff thought of it and got the kids working while I was gone. They washed windows, cleaned the bathroom, cleaned and vacuumed the playroom, and Jeff also wiped the kitchen table (cleaning each individual groove in it) and swept the kitchen floor!! I don't remember the last time my family spontaneously cleaned anything without me forcing, coercing, or asking them to. It was the best feeling. Normally I do so much work and nobody cares or notices, and I am always the one to remind/force the kids to do their chores. Housework feels like a burden that I carry alone. It meant so much more than I can say to find my husband cleaning the sticky grooves on our kitchen table while the kids worked as well. I told them what a wonderful early bird present this was!
The other night I took the love language quiz again for fun because words of affirmation were not cutting it, and my primary love language has changed! This time acts of service came out on top, scoring 9 points, closely followed by quality time (8) and words of affirmation (also 8). I told Jeff and laughed that it changed because I was so tired of doing so much by myself and I wanted help--acts of service! We chuckled. Cross country season has been busy and often I have felt starved of spousal attention and household support. It's exhausting doing this alone! I don't know if that conversation inspired Jeff's sudden cleaning spree today, or if my reminder last night that we needed to make sure that the kids got their chores done today did it. Either way, I hope this happens again soon!
Is it bad that my family cleaning spontaneously and willingly is so rare? I feel selfish because my main reaction to this after my initial pleasure was "I want more!" I want my family to notice when there's a mess and clean it ALL up without being told. I want to feel like everyone cares about our house. I don't want to feel like the family slave, ignored and taken for granted. Jeff will rinse the dinner dishes most nights, and I depend on that glimmer of hopeful help. I mean, we all do our part for the family. I don't go help Jeff teach at the high school! But it is nice to have a little nod, a little help. After all that cleaning, Jeff took his lunch to sit at the table, where everyone had already eaten and left crumbs all over the table. He stood there eyeing the mess in dismay, and I couldn't resist laughing and saying "welcome to my life!"
Regardless of whether they ever do it again or not, I am so glad that Jeff and the kids cleaned today. They spoke my love language right there and I seriously felt so happy!
This afternoon I took some Tylenol to combat my sinus headache before heading outside to do some pumpkin carving in the front yard: Jeff scooped out four pumpkins and carved two of them before I finished carving my cat pumpkin. Jay sliced his thumb with his pocket knife. Rose took twice as long as everyone to carve hers, so the rest of us lounged in the sun while waiting for her. Amber threw her pumpkin down the basement steps before we even started, cracking it wide open. We hosed off the table when we were done. Whew, we survived one of the hardest October traditions!
Meow. I carved a cat.
Defeated by the porch shadows, we made a second attempt at a group-kin (group pumpkin picture)...
Sunday, October 29, 2017
9:00pm. This morning we went to our ward for 2.5 hours, then drove to Prosser while eating lunch in the car. We went to sacrament meeting of our dear ole Rattlesnake Mountain Ward to watch the primary program there. The program was so good. The kids' cousins Layne and Tate said their parts from memory perfectly with cute little grins on their faces. They still won't talk to their Scary Aunt Shaina or even acknowledge me and they definitely wouldn't give me a high five when I told them good job after the program, but oh well. We were there. And they do love their cousins, so that's something. It was so good to see so many familiar beloved faces in the Rattlesnake Mountain Ward. Hugs all around! I didn't get to say hi to everyone I wanted to, but it was good to be there.
BREAKING NEWS: During Primary at our ward today, I had a face-off with my latest musical nemesis, Children's Songbook #246: It's Autumn Time. And I CONQUERED! I played it! I managed to keep up even when my fingers stumbled. I must've practiced that tiny two line song over 100 times this week--close to three hours on that one pesky tricky little tune--and we sang it through once at church. HAH! Oh the joys of being a pianist! Thankfully I nailed (mostly) the other three songs today too, which was exciting. I definitely still had some anxious nerves sitting back there on the piano bench, but they were not as bad as last time. Every time I stopped consciously trying to keep my nerves under control, though, they got shakier! But I survived. One of my survival techniques was to pretend that the chorister was praising my playing whenever she said "good job" or "that was beautiful" to the kids after they sang a song. It reminded me of playing for the sister missionaries and all of their kind praise and encouragement. One of the sister missionaries waved at me and gave me a thumbs up when she walked past the open primary room door. I waved back and felt encouraged. Those sister missionaries are gems.
Jay FaceTimed his Missouri cousin-buddy Steve this afternoon, and it was the cutest thing. Jay could talk to Steve all day. Jeff reminded him to ask Steve how he's doing and how his birthday was so Steve could get a few words in here and there. Every now and then Jay would stop talking and ask Steve an unrelated question, like "so how are you?" it was so funny. Conversation is a learned skill. I'm still learning it too! At one point I heard Jay tell Steve "If I had one superpower right now, it would be to give you a big hug." That's my Jay.
This afternoon we got home from Prosser a little after 3pm. I was feeling tired and cranky and kind of done with the day after nearly five hours of church, but it was nowhere near bedtime. And we had plans for the afternoon: Halloweeny plans! So I swallowed most of my impatience and corralled the kids into making our favorite witch finger cookies. After that we worked on hanging our old paper ghosts and pumpkins, then made more spooky paper pictures to hang around the kitchen. We have quite the grave scene forming on the side of the fridge: zombies, witch's brew, graves, brains, and even some blood (a scribble of marker, carefully cut out by Jay and taped onto the fridge near the witch and her brew). It was fun drawing and inventing with my kids, in spite of my sinus headache. After our rough week, it felt especially good to play together.
Jeff and Jay made dinner: Jeff made grilled cheese, and Jay heated some tomato soup on the stove--one of his new skills that he's honing. That is a true family favorite and we all slurped it down with carrots and sugar snap peas and homemade applesauce on the side. And witch fingers for dessert! After cleaning up dinner (Jay loaded the dishwasher like a pro), we went downstairs and crammed onto the single old couch in front of the old TV (since Amber broke the good TV by the big comfy couch upstairs) to watch It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown in seven 3-minute segments on YouTube. We finally broke down and ordered the wildly overpriced DVD version of that beloved classic this year, but it won't arrive before Halloween, so we YouTube'd it once more. Tracking that cartoon down on YouTube has become a family Halloween tradition in itself--I wonder if we will miss doing that next year. Haha.
Pumpkin carving yesterday, plus the witch fingers, spooky paper cutouts, and the Great Pumpkin today: WHEW, Halloween can come now. We started all of these traditions back before life was busy, and we used to spread them out over a week or two. With cross country, piano lessons, and cub scouts, our time all together is at a premium and we had to cram 90% of our Halloween traditions into one weekend. It worked! We did it! It was exhausting! My head is still stuffy and a tad throbby. I actually took Tylenol before we carved pumpkins yesterday because pumpkin carving with kids is always a bit of a headache without full sinuses, and I had full sinuses.
Lesson from today: it is still very possible to have positive happy quality time with my kids and family when I'm tired and cranky. I just have to focus on the fun and not let all of the little issues get under my skin. Flour poofing out of the mixer all over my sleeve? Laugh about it with Rose and say oops while trying to block the puffs together. Amber coloring red marker all over her tummy and legs while we were doing our paper Halloween scene? Tell the kids it looks like Amber got in a zombie fight and lost, and laugh about it. Finding the humor is always the best way to deal with kids, because it seems like there is always something that could potentially drive me crazy. If I can just do better at shifting my perspective just a little, stop worrying about extra work from a mess, stop battling the explorations of Amber, [get rid of this blasted sinus headache], just laugh and move on, life will be so much easier! A lot of days I am excellent at this. It's much easier when Jeff is around to laugh with me or to remind me to laugh. And when I don't have a headache.
Thank goodness for this weekend at home. All together. No meets, activities, appointments, nothing. It was just what we all needed.
FaceTiming cousins needs to be part of our Sunday routine.
Making witch fingers
Jeff captures details when I assign him camera duty.
Rose drew the cutest little witch of all time.
Queen Amber sat just like that in the middle of the kitchen table while we made our ghostly graveyard artwork. Eventually she snagged a red marker and scribbled it all over her tummy and legs.
Jay is still honing his can opening skills. Tomato soup is his specialty.
I like it when my boys cook.
Crammed in, watching Charlie Brown.
