this or that

I have finished all of the laundry and put it away and mopped the floors and cleaned the windows like I do every Tuesday. I will be on the computer for 15 minutes while I eat an apple and then Lucky and I will get out the craft supplies and work on our popsicle cabin.

or

I put a load of laundry in the washer, folded the clothes from the dryer and left them on top of the washer, spot cleaned the bathroom floor with a clorox wipe and now I'm sitting here with a bag of fritos while Lucky watches t.v.




After I bake some gluten-free chocolate chip cookies I will go pick up the boys from school. They will chatter happily about their day and share the organic fruit snacks that they have leftover from lunch. Zach will give Tate all of the blue ones because he knows how much he loves them, and Tate will give Zach all the red ones in return.

or

I will rush a crying Lucky out the door at the last second yelling "we are going to be late!" Zach and Tate will push and shove each other into the van yelling "I CALLED THAT SEAT!" Zach will pull out some treat that he got at school and eat it loudly while Tate watches and whines that he "WANTS SOME OF THAT!" and  " ZACH...STOP CHEWING WITH YOUR MOUTH OPEN!" I will say as if it's the first time I've said it "GUYS! KNOCK IT OFF! I look forward to seeing you guys after school and then you get in the van and make everyone miserable!" If I have the energy I will add a threat. It would be something like this "If you guys are going to make me miserable I'll make you miserable! You might as well fight and cry while YOU ARE PAINTING THE SHED!"




I will enjoy the quiet, neat and clean house when it is empty.

or

I will be more miserable in the quiet, neat and clean house than I ever was in a loud crumb filled mini-van.

In God We Trust

Pastor Skar ended his sermon this morning by telling us that when we face fear we should look at a coin and remember the words "In God We Trust."

For me, as a mom of four busy boys who come up with ideas like riding their skateboard down the slide, and moving their playground ladder from tree to tree, it is extremely difficult to say "In God We Trust" and actually mean it. What if He isn't watching when they're jumping their bikes over a rickety make-shift ramp in the driveway, or when they are swimming at a friend's house, or wrestling too close to the brick hearth on the fireplace? Does He really understand how important it is that they have friends with the same lunch hour in middle school, and that they are not bullied on the playground? Does He realize that I am convinced that they are all too young and sweet and innocent to endure pain and sickness of any kind?

When I am faced with a particularly tough situation there is a 'mommy experience' that I often think about. When our babies are a few months old we begin the series of vaccinations that they receive several times throughout childhood. I take a smiling baby to a smiling nurse. I hold him on my lap and he's still happy and trusting. Then the nice nurse takes what to him looks like a long, sharp thing and jabs it into his pudgy leg. He cries, I hold him, and I let the nurse jab him three more times. I think about how this situation appears to a baby. Mommy, who he trusts more than anyone and who loves him more than anyone, allows him to be hurt again and again. He has no understanding of why this is happening. He doesn't know that his parents are trying to protect him by allowing this horrible thing to happen.

Just as I understand more than my 3 month old child, God understands so much more than me. I can picture myself as the trusting child who is hurt without understanding why. I can picture God as the parent who tries to comfort me during the hurt but allows the hurt to happen for my own good. I can try my best to trust again as quickly as my sons, who were usually smiling at me again by the time we reached the mini-van.

 I can hope to do better at believing that God knows what He is doing not only when my fears are centered on myself, but when they are centered on my children. I'm sure I will always be praying that a nosebleed is just a nosebleed, and a bad mood just a phase ,but when things don't go the way I wish they would, I can know that God is holding my boys on his lap, and I can say "In God We Trust."

From where I sit

I can see a ladder against a tree with a four wheeler parked beside it...a train track that starts in the kitchen and goes up the stairs, a Thomas the Tank engine coloring book, a mini-sandbox stuffed with yellow trucks, two plugged in but empty ipod chargers, a little boy with a bright yellow t-shirt that is on backwards, playing with and talking to toy trains, a stuffed backpack that should be at school but is home with a "sick" 9 year old who is busy sorting his football cards downstairs, a print of the last supper that that same 9 year old bought me as a gift from a garage sale, smudged windows, a lego castle that "can not be moved" because it is the scene of an ongoing homemade lego movie, a book club book that is pretty good, a card game called wig-out that I ike to play with my cheerful 7 year old, 3 tissue-paper flowers that the boys made at Sunday School, a wall that needs painted.

shoes, cups and flies

We got an old camper about three years ago and promised the boys every year that we would go camping "this summer. for sure." Three summers later we went. Loading a camper is a miserable experience. I think it takes me maybe 8 hours to load the camper. Once we get to the campsite though, it turns out I love camping....and the boys seem to love it too.....and Bryce went and got the camper in perfect working order so I think he likes it too (or at least doesn't hate it.)

I woud like camping more if I had a plan for the shoes, the cups and the flies. It's hard to get through the camper when there are six pairs of shoes in the very very narrow hallway. I don't want to wash cups, but we go through 74 plastic cups a day. There are a lot of flies and lots of flies makes everything feel really really dirty.

to blog or not to blog

that is the question