It's just a phase

Oh my dear Lord, Andrew is wearing me out these days. Wearing. Me. Out. Like an old sweater. I am the old sweater, moth-eaten and pilled. 

He can be adorable, though. Oh yes. See how adorable he is here, in this last-day-of-school photo, holding his out-of-season bunny ears:

He can be precious and hilarious and so sweet that you just want to nibble on him.

And then he can be a terror. I remember this being a tricky age with William, so intellectually I do know that this is a phase. And it will eventually come to an end. But the meantime is utterly exhausting.

For example, Andrew no longer feels compelled to take a nap. Never mind that he still needs a nap most days. Nope, he's not going to take one. But then he's exhausted and shrieky and wound-up by dinnertime, which makes dinnertime awful and bathtime even worse. 

I can hear you thinking, "So just put him to bed early." Ha HA! If only it were that easy. Putting him to bed early means that he just pops in and out of his room for an hour or two. He might demand water. Or announce that he wants William to see his pajamas. Or he might just enjoy opening and closing his door, over and over and OVER and over again. 

The end result of this is that he doesn't get enough rest, and I'm tired and frustrated, too. 

William was tricky at three, William was tricky at three, William was tricky at three. I just have to keep reminding myself that we somehow made it through. If I could just remember how we did it, though...

Hey look, it's William on the last day of school when he was newly three!

Big Boy Bed...Sort Of

Whenever Andrew starts to drive me nuts again, I have to remind myself that William was a bit of a terror at this age, too. And it, too, passed. In fact, William, bless his heart, even likes to remind me about all the exasperating things he did when he was three. 

So knowing that this is a rather, er, tricky age for the young men in my family, it was with some trepidation that we took down the crib yesterday. Here's a picture of Andrew all gleeful at the prospect of giving up the crib for a big boy bed at long last. 

If you're saying, "Wow! That looks like trouble personified!" I would have to agree with you. He's adorable, yes, but oh, he can be such a handful. Maybe several handfuls. It's the age, it's the age, it's the age. If we can just make it to age four....

So this is the big boy bed, sans bed.

We put a mattress and box springs directly on the floor, while we wait for the actual bed to be delivered. Andrew didn't care, though. He was just delighted by the prospect of No More Crib. And to his credit, he eagerly tossed his beloved binky in the trash can, as we had agreed months ago that a big boy bed meant no more binkies. And he did so on his own free will, with no coercing from us. And didn't look back. And didn't even whine for it later.

Of course, he was up and down for hours last night after we put him to bed. And he was up and down all afternoon when he was supposed to be napping. He played the xylophone. He played with the castle. He took a can of Lysol and sprayed the whole thing on his dresser and ruined the finish. Good times.

And now he's resisting bedtime again. Normal. It's normal. He's got to be exhausted but he's just so darned excited by his new sleeping arrangements that he can barely stand it. I hope it becomes less thrilling soon.

How many more months 'til he turns four again?

Hello, Seven!

So the craziest thing happened on Monday.

William turned seven. Seven years old. SEVEN.

See that? That's what a seven-year-old looks like!

I can't quite grasp it in some ways. I mean, I remember being seven pretty well. I had a birthday party in our yard, and we played in the sprinkler. We borrowed one of those funny jobbies where the sprinkler resembled a clown face, and the force of the stream of water from the hose made his hat rise up in the air. Then I entered second grade, and my teacher's name was Mrs. Munson. We learned the song "Eidelweiss" in her class that year. I had a navy blue backpack with a big red strawberry patch on the pocket. See? See how much I remember? Seven wasn't that long ago for me!

Except, well, yeah, it was. This is what seven looks like in my world now:

So a belated happy birthday to my sunny firstborn son! You've always been so full of life and laughter. You're so friendly and warm and encouraging toward others. You ask such thoughtful questions and come up with the most amazing answers. You're reading chapter books, like The Magic Treehouse series, and you're a master at Legos. Yep, you're seven all right. I'm not quite sure how we got here, but it's been a pretty fun ride!

Easter photos

Here are my boys, all cleaned up on Easter Sunday. Actually, I should admit that in this photo, Andrew's arm is not raised so that he can hug his big brother. No, I managed to snap this photo in the nanosecond before Andrew hit his big brother. In the church. Lovely. 

After church we went home, where we managed to get a few slightly more angelic photos of the two:

Aw, I am going to miss those sweet little outfits like the one Andrew is wearing. He's just about to outgrow them. Look how grown up William looks in his button-down shirt with his grown-up front teeth!

I thought that it would be easy to get good pictures of them by this time. Ha ha! Well, William is finally old enough to sit still and smile on cue, but Andrew cheerfully disregards any pleas to smile and look sweet for the camera. I'm not actually sure how we managed to get these last couple of photos, come to think of it. David's camera has a faster shutter speed than mine, which may have been key. 

Diane did manage to successfully capture the whole family in one good picture, though! 

Don't look too closely at the way I'm clutching Andrew's legs to keep him from diving out of my arms.

Honestly, though?

This is what Andrew and William are really like:

I mean, what else can I tell you? They're nuts. I adore them, and they are so incredibly silly. 

Kairos Time

Sometimes I'm just so tired because parenting is so exhausting. How many times in one day can you take it when your three-year-old keeps taking off his shoes while asking "why?" over and over and over again in an increasingly louder voice? Or when both your kids insist on wrestling each other on the hardwood floor, and then scream when they inevitably bash their heads into it? Or when you have to scrounge up food for nutritious meals to serve to your kids three times a day but they whine that they don't want to eat more vegetables? Did I mention the never-ending stream of requests for snacks? Don't get me started on the whole production that is making William do his homework. 

Sometimes I just have to say, "Oh well." For example, on Sunday after church, a woman stood in the doorway with a disapproving look at on her face while my children raced noisily through the door. But I was so tired of keeping up with them and with everything that I have to do that I just let them be rowdy. (Don't worry, I didn't let them knock anyone over. Other than themselves, that is.) I just didn't have any more energy to police them for something that, by that point, didn't seem like a very big deal. 

I've also had those days when I've been so freaking busy, with deadlines raining down on top of me, that I have just pushed my kids away from me constantly, with increasing frustration...only to hear the strains of "Cat's in the Cradle" echoing in the back of my brain. Argh. Argh. Argh. I've thought, while I flipped through journal articles and double-checked academic credentials of expert sources, "My kids are going to grow up and only remember the woman frantically trying to write six articles at once and batting them away from her while she typed furiously. They're going to remember the woman who yelled at them to be quiet all the time." 

I want us all to be able to find those special, magic, sacred moments in our lives that make it okay to still live with the rest of the craziness that we kind of have to live with. I want some kairos time sprinkled in among my chronos time.


The Peevish Mama has written about the precarious balance of kairos and chronos, and so has Glennon at the Momastery. Glennon wrote one particular paragraph in her blog post about kairos vs. chronos that leaped out at me:

"I used to worry that not only was I failing to do a good enough job at parenting, but that I wasn’t enjoying it enough. Double failure.  I felt guilty because I wasn’t in parental ecstasy every hour of every day and I wasn’t MAKING THE MOST OF EVERY MOMENT like the mamas in the parenting magazines seemed to be doing. I felt guilty because honestly, I was tired and cranky and ready for the day to be over quite often. And because I knew that one day, I’d wake up and the kids would be gone, and I’d be the old lady in the grocery store with my hand over my heart. Would I be able to say I enjoyed every moment? No."

Oh boy, that hits me where I sometimes live. I love my children. I love them deeply. But sometimes, the daily wear-and-tear of parenting is just...well, I'd be lying if I said that I loved every  minute of it. 

But Glennon pointed out something else that pierced my heart and gave me hope. You can't live in kairos time all the time, obviously. You have to go to Target. You have to clean the bathroom. You have to do all those chores of daily living and parenting. But you can look for those kairos moments folded into the chronos time. And you can savor them. She wrote,

"These kairos moments leave as fast as they come- but I mark them. I say the word kairos in my head each time I leave chronos. And at the end of the day, I don’t remember exactly what my kairos moments were, but I remember I had them. And that makes the pain of the daily parenting climb worth it. ....If I had a couple Kairos moments during the day, I call it a success."

I'm going to work on that. I'm going to work on being more deliberate about looking for the kairos in my life. In the meantime, here's a picture of some kairos time with my family yesterday afternoon...

We just went out in the yard for a little while and kicked the soccer ball around. We weren't out there a really long time, and yes, there were other things that we probably "should" have been doing. I say "should" because David and I both had work to do that we ended up working on that evening. I probably should have been making dinner and washing clothes. But we put it aside for a little while just to get outside and play with the kids. 

Because these kinds of moments, the ones with the soccer ball in the backyard on a windy Sunday afternoon,

are the ones that I hope that we all remember.

Three is the magic number

From this....

    

to this, in just three short years!

See how he's holding up three fingers? That's so you'll know that he's three years old now.

Happy birthday to my beloved second son, Andrew. You are such a wonderful, funny little boy, sometimes shy and sometimes exuberant. It has been quite an adventure, my sweet, sweet boy. 

As most parents do, we tend to mythologize the birth story of both of our boys. The stories are true, of course, but there's a certain way of telling them that makes them into Stories, if you know what I mean. Andrew's birth story always starts out, "It snowed the day you were born!"

And it did. I remember watching the snowflakes drift down from the sky from my hospital room. I remember fretting that I'd sent William off to school in a Red Sox baseball cap, instead of a warm stocking hat. I remember bringing along a bag full of fleecy warm baby clothes and blankets because we were planning to bring home a new baby(!) in that cold, cold weather. 

Today was a sunny day, cold but not bitingly cold. We went to church, then came home for lunch. Andrew took a nap, while I threw together his little birthday party. The only thing he requested was chocolate cake, and by George, we had ourselves some chocolate cake tonight. Pizza and chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream. It doesn't get much better than that when you're three years old. 

Three years old. No longer a baby, but a little boy. A little boy who loves Corduroy and Super Why and cats and dogs and yogurt and strawberries and, yes, chocolate cake. A little boy who stubbornly refuses to potty train but who so desperately wants to be a big kid like his brother. A little boy who puts crayons underneath all the doors in the house and when asked why, explains "They help the doors feel better." (Because that makes sense to him, somehow.) A little boy who will very soon (I promise, sweetie) get his long-awaited big boy bed. A little boy who still loves to be carried by his mama...until he's ready to be put down so he can run, run, run. 

My precious little boy, Andrew. 

Happy Groundhog Snow Day

Snow! A Groundhog Day Snow Storm!

Okay, so "snow storm" is a bit of an exaggeration. It would be like calling a VW Bug a giant car. We got enough of a dusting of snow last Thursday evening that William's school was closed on Friday, and then it snowed again that night and we woke up to a winter wonderland on Saturday. The 9 am basketball game was cancelled (yeeha!), and I began scouring the house for weather-appropriate attire so we could venture outside and play.

We had a short-lived snow-handful fight (too loose and powdery to make good snowballs)

and William made a snow angel or four

and Andrew got in a few last tossed handfuls of snow

and then we went inside and guzzled down some hot chocolate, as God intended for snow days.

It's a good thing that we did our playing in the early morning (all of these photos were taken before 9 a.m.) because the snow had completely melted by early afternoon. It was if we had dreamed it.

Every time it snows, I reminisce about how it snowed the day Andrew was born, and how I was so relieved that I was actually in the hospital, safe, when the snowflakes began to fly. I fretted that whole winter that I would go into labor in the middle of one of that winter's frequent snowfalls, stranding me at our house. This year, I just worry about whether everyone has a hat and mittens and the right shoes. Much better.