Five-year-old James Joyce

Are there always tornadoes in June?
Are there tornadoes every day in June? What about across the Great Atlantic Ocean?
What is a sharpie for? How do you get sharpie off of stuff? Is it called sharpie get-off soap? Would water work to take it off? Why would you want to write something you can't get off?
When will you be done writing? I wish I was God, because then I could do anything I wanted.

How can Meta-Knight turn into a tornado anyway?
How does Mario shoot fireballs out of his hands?
Where is this made in? Why does this kind of look like a stapler? But it doesn't do the same thing? Why does this move back and forth?  Do some things have the thing you press down and the ink comes off things and it makes the label?
What does evangelical mean?

I'm very strong. I bet I could knock a whole window down in one bash.  I bet I could throw that and it could get damaged pretty well.  I'm that strong.
Pikachu. Pikachu. Pikachu. Pikachu.
How come when I pick Pikachu on Super Squash Brothers, my controller goes "Uh-oy"?
The bullets go on the tornado. The light from the moon shines on Pikachu and that means he will save them.

How come there are different ways to label things? Can these labels stay on forever. Can the ink labels stay on forever? What if you use printer ink? How come the stuff on your calendar ink never comes off?

Squirrel noises.
For Amber's next birthday, I'm thinking we should buy her a Sophia dress.  She has all the other supplies but not the dress.
Dad? You know the thing where you sit on at Bible Study? Sometimes we use that and put some preschool clothes on it and that makes a stand because nothing else makes a stand, well I think so, but there might be something else that does, I don't know, there might be and there might not.

Dashi, I'm already on it.  I'm already on it, Captain. I'm already on it, Captain. I'm already on it Captain. I'm already on it, Captain.
Humming "Octonauts" theme.
Dad, is it okay if I erase some of your Bible Study things? I won't erase them all.  I just need a spot to draw a computer.

The lab launch will never end.  It's a good spot on the earth. But there is a spot where I can slide back to earth.

Award Night

Last Friday, I told my son he could invite his friends over today.

I delayed making arrangements this morning.  I kept hoping he'd throw up or something so I could avoid dealing with extra children and take a nap this afternoon.


Mother of the year, indeed.

There's something in a Sunday

Sunday mornings are tough.  Somewhere between the struggle to put down the trains and put on church clothes, the two of us have successfully broken the first five commandments, and finally show up for church with our angry eyes.  I'm sure most parents have heard the same complaints: There's nothing for me to do at church.  Church takes too long. Church isn't fun. I don't want to think about Jesus, I want to think about trains!

Imagine my surprise then, on Tuesday morning, when my child starts proclaiming the truth about church.

"God doesn't give us too many gifts at church.  He just gives us a few.  He gives us his Word."

"But what does His Word produce?"

"Faith."

"And what does faith give us?"

"Life and salvation.  But that's only two gifts."

"But they are very valuable gifts."

"And no one can steal them from us. And these are the gifts we should rejoice.  And if anyone came to my house to try to steal them, I would say, 'Sorry, Jesus died for me and saved me from my sin.'"

So there it is.  The sound of a Sunday morning coming down might seem awful lonesome to me, and the congregation may be sick of our angry eyes, but my child's faith is growing, despite his stubborn sinful nature.

New Tricks

Had you told me three years that I'd be playing the piano for one the services during Holy Week at the church of my husband's first call, I would have laughed.  Three years ago, I didn't have a piano. Three years ago I couldn't play a single hymn. Three years ago, I wasn't able to envision a life without an infant clinging to me.

How things have changed.  Last year, my cousins gave us great-grandma's upright piano.  A few months ago, I started practicing hymns.  Somewhere in all that time, the infant grew up to be a much-less needy preschooler.  So I let him sit with someone else during the service, and I played for Good Friday.  And I'll play again for Sundays.  Maybe once I stop hitting so many wrong notes, I'll even learn to get my feet in the mix and give the organ a go.

Advice from the other side

I met a dear woman at a pancake feed this past Sunday.  I am grateful to her for sharing with me some of the wisdom she had learned from her days of child-rearing.  I would do well to remember it.

"When your children are doing something that makes you want to die, turn your head; you'll feel better."

Indeed, I will feel better.   We all will feel better.

Milestones

Before my son was born, someone gave me a lovely calendar for me to track the first year of his life.  Each page had ample space for me to add pictures of him, and included stickers to mark all his milestones, significant events, and even visits from grandparents on their appropriate date.  While I haven't yet added any pictures to the calendar, I was able to get those stickers on the approximate day each one occurred.  Approximate because I updated the thing once every few months. Grandparents were updated a bit more regularly, but usually in a nonchalant manner a week after the fact, and only because they asked.

Now that he's three, I find myself doing all sorts of little happy dances over milestones, and have to refrain from announcing to everyone I see that my kid understands that we use letters to make words.  Or that he just memorized a book so he could read it to me.  Or that he picked up a new book and told the story by looking at the pictures.  That he has phonological awareness.  That he draws people with eyes, mouths, arms, legs, and necks.  That he can draw a recognizable train.  That he can identify 5:30 on an analog clock. That he can represent the number of people in a room with his fingers.  That he can put the silverware away. That he memorized the First Commandment and it's meaning.

I shouldn't be surprised by any of this.  After all, I sat through four good years of teacher education studying how children develop and learn.  Yet, it astounds me to watch all of this unfolding.  It astounds me more than any of those other important first year milestones ever did.  My kid is an early emergent reader.  My kid is doing simple math.  My kid is understanding his faith.

I'm sure it merely reinforces the fact that I'm a complete nerd, but really, why can't we get some stickers for these exciting times?

For the nursing mother

Or the humor-deprived mother, or the grandmother, or the mother's lactation consultant;  really, it's just a good book for anyone who has tried breastfeeding.  Especially good for those of us who tried it and found it rather daunting.

Seriously.  It's like she had been sitting on my couch with me all those months.

For the Kindle, for the bookshelf or that other bookshelf, for more information.

We'll Keep It

Once in college, I shelled out twenty-five dollars for a faded loveseat that harkened back to the 70s.  It was my first furniture purchase (and so far, my only furniture purchase-everything we now own was either a gift from family, or found sitting on the side of the road begging to be plastered with beer labels).   Though it was a bit small, I found that it was perfect for all the reading I did to get that English concentration, and, if I tucked up my legs enough, would sleep quite comfortably.

But it was kind of ugly.  So I tried covering it- first with a fitted sheet that forever had to be readjusted, and then by putting my high school set-building skills to work and attaching fabric to it with a staple gun.  Eventually, I made a slip cover, once the staples starting pulling out and stabbing my arm every time I attempted to use the arm rest.  So the little couch moved from dorm room to dorm room, and once I married, fit quite nicely into our oddly narrow living room.  It's now been lugged from state to state with all of our moving, even though we've acquired a real, unfaded couch.

Last summer, I overhead my parents discussing this little couch as it was loaded into our moving pods.  "How many more moves before they ditch that thing?" my father asked my mother. Well, Pops, that little couch isn't going anywhere soon.  I have visions of passing it on to my son when he moves out of the house.  It would be quite poetic.  After all, it's the very place I sat all those hours, weeks, months (!) after he was born- nursing, napping, eating, pumping.  The only seat in house I could find that was both comfortable to sit, and possible to leave.  And since my kid took for.ever. to nurse, and wanted to nurse every two hours, and wouldn't sleep unless someone was holding him, I spent a lot of time on that little loveseat.  Enough time, in fact, to catch up on the past seasons of House, CSI, and Friday Night Lights. 

Besides all that, it's still the most comfortable seat in the house, and should I have pleasure of nursing another child, I can't imagine anywhere else I'd sit.  Unless, of course, someone feels like buying me one of these: