Laughing is my Favorite

Sometimes I get very discouraged by the group of people I'm affiliated with---and we're not just affiliated; if you're a Christian, no matter the denomination, you are my brother or sister in Christ.  We're spending ETERNITY together.  I'll be honest, there are many Christians that I hope are busy enjoying a different part of heaven when I get there, because they bum me out.  My passion for my people has recently be reignited by a guy I've never met nor side hugged and a great little book and blog called Stuff Christians Like.  Jon Acuff, your musings tickle my funny bone like nothing has in a very long time, and I really needed it during an election year.

Why do we take ourselves so seriously?  We are a strange bunch.  Admitting this doesn't make God any less amazing or loving; it is really more amazing that he still loves us despite our shenanigans.  I'd like to pick out a couple of examples from the book, but for some reason the intense humor gets lost in translation. This weekend my husband and I were giggling at the Ninjas, Half and Halves, and Pound Cakes at our worship service and counting how many times God's favorite word was used in prayer. You just have to check it out for yourself.   

Wanderlust

Back in 1987, which feels like both yesterday and another lifetime altogether, I spent a year abroad in Belgium as a foreign exchange student.  Something took hold of me a few years before, when I was pretty deeply entrenched in teen angst and rebellion, a wanderlust that I have been unable to shake even to this day.  I had always been one of those people who wanted to be somewhere else, live a different life, experience something entirely new.  How many middle schoolers beg their mothers to move to another city?  Well that was me, and by 15 I had just enough French under my belt at school to know that I was wired for languages---I wanted to travel the globe.  Belgium was my first taste of the expatriate experience. It was both a transformational trial by fire and a gift.  Belgium stripped away my persona and its costume and left me to search for true identity and meaning.


Here is what I love the most about the interweb.  I have started to craft a memoir about my year in Belgium, and I can look up pictures to jog my memory.  This is Tavier, the first village I lived in.  How far away from high desert Nevada could you get?  Within the first few days, I had already attended a wedding reception inside the walls of a centuries old dairy and eaten Saturday supper with a group of the villagers.  It was an amazing year. My sister joked that I am trying to single-handedly destroy the foreign exchange program when I told her a couple of the things that happened to me that year. I guess it's weird that there are things I've never told anyone--not her, not my parents or my husband even. As I think about it, I believe that I returned home so entirely different that I had to work really hard to pretend I was still the same.  But I never was.  I was totally "Exchanged". 

The Gang's All Here

It's amazing that I can still eat after what I had to clean up this morning, and yet here I am, chowing on my cold cereal, ignoring briefly the screaming toddler at my feet.  I swear, I'm not cut out for this. But when I think about all the little crises I deal with on a daily basis and realize that we're all still alive, especially these little people God mistakenly entrusted to me, I think that maybe I could do anything.  I could climb Mt. Everest, except for the freezing my butt off and the lack of oxygen.
I know that my kids are destined to do great things in this world, because God took a young woman with no desire whatsoever for motherhood, and gave her such a yearning that she could not let it go until each one of these people was birthed on the planet.  You may look at me with my 5 kids, one carried kangaroo style and one looking like she could be the mom, and think "that poor woman."  She must be Catholic, or crazy or Mormon, or stupid, or too lazy to use birth control.  The truth is that I had to pray and wait for each of these blessings, and lose a couple on the way.  Each time we integrated another person into our family, I just felt that the picture wasn't complete.  

They are all here now, and the fog has lifted.  I now clearly see the challenge set out for me and it is terrifying and exhilarating.  Dealing with all of these bodily fluids is the easy part---we're moving into crushes and peer influence, and I'm facing the ghosts of my adolescent past.  How much do I share?  How soon?  Already my eldest is amazingly brighter, prettier, stronger, wiser than I was at that age. But I've got boys riding past our house on their bikes, texing, and requesting friendship on Facebook.  I need another cup of coffee.

Poopscepade

It all began so innocently.  After being up with Juju at 3am, I just wanted to grab a couple of extra minutes of sleep.  He crawled out of my bed and started toddling around the kitchen.  I could hear him in there talking to himself and calling out to siblings to wake up.  My body was in one of those uber relaxed sleepy states, and I told myself, "he's fine, he'll find the legos on the floor and play for a little bit.  A few minutes later he came back to the bedside and tried to climb up.  Having some difficulty, he said "Uh oh."  I took pity on him,  leaned over to pull him up, and got an armful of nasty stinky poo.  Holy crap, indeed...it was everywhere.  All over him, all over the sheets (because apparently this is why he crawled out of bed in the first place), tracked through the house.  With no coffee on board, I was at a total disadvantage.

Game plan: throw baby in bath, brew coffee, strip sheets, do detail.  I thought I had it all under control, when I came around a corner and found it smeared on the floor and my treadmill.  I think my husband put him up to this. At this point, I just want my mommy, but if I called her she'd just laugh and remind me of the time I did the same but worse.  Moral of the story? Don't sweat the small stuff.

The Boy

I questioned whether to write about this or not, but thinking of another brave mom who writes about it all, I'm forging ahead.  I want any mom out there to know that her instincts are the best source of understanding for her individual child--as long as she's not smoking meth or spaced out on the disco biscuits.  For months I've been angsting over the state of my son's brain, educational health, emotional development, etc.  I'm no stranger to highly spirited children, for all of mine appear to fall somewhere in that category, but I am a mom of 3 girls before my boy, so I was never sure if I was dealing with issues of gender or true developmental delay.  And I'll go ahead and say it, even though the big boys don't want to hear it, you are all a little delayed.  That was just for me so I could chuckle.

When I put my little man in preschool this year, it was with a certain amount of urgency as he was talking much less at 3 than my daughters had.  All year I kept taking his educational pulse with his teachers, and he made huge strides.  But here we have arrived at the end of the year, and I find myself still struggling to get him to follow simple directions.  It's as if he has ear plugs in, or he seriously cannot pull his attention away from anything that he's focusing on or he will die.  And if we do pull him away, it's full melt down mode, and my husband is all with the tough love and time out in the corner.  Something just doesn't seem right though, and everyone is telling me it's just a "boy thing".  I don't want to be the ostrich mom with her head firmly planted in the sand, wearing a big blinged out necklace that says "boy thing".  After a recent birthday party where all the other boys managed to eat their cake at the table without screaming about sitting in one certain seat, and where the other boys didn't have melt downs because they couldn't open the present they were giving to the birthday boy, I decided that I was going to have my son evaluated.  I put it on my "to do" list, and promptly procrastinated.  One month later God arranged for the school district to provide free early childhood screening at my daughters' school, so I had to go.  I seriously almost turned the car around. None of us wants to admit that there might be something wrong with our child.  Further proof of this is that during this 4 hour window of opportunity, only 3 or 4 other parents arrived at the screening, all with their adorable quirky boys in tow. Sigh.

My son demonstrated his "self directed" behavior very clearly at the screening and had a great time lining up a bin of cars according to color while I talked to an angel of an autism specialist for our school district.  Both the psychologist and the speech/language therapist agreed that if they could only get him to respond to the questions, they knew he would score higher.  They assure me that there are no short buses in Douglas county, but I'm still crying at the thought of putting him on the bus at all. I still haven't even had the IEP meeting to discuss what my son might need to get him ready for kindergarten, but I'm always one to run in front of the horse I'm supposed to be riding.

Seventeen Years of Wedded Life

There's this person in my life,
who's always reaching, kissing, enjoying me.
Filling me with joy, and likewise anger.
There's this person, my love for whom
I can't explain.  He came upon me suddenly.
He came and would not leave.
My love showed me what never leaving felt like.  What clinging tight to love might bring.
My love is now my husband,
here to stay, forever holding, cherishing,
fighting for me.
My husband, one I never thought would come,
happened on me suddenly, and here he will stay.

"Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy as unyeilding as the grave.  It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.  Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away." (Song of Songs 8:6-7)

I wrote this poem for my husband when we wed...it's rough, and so were we.  I think we are a testament to what tenacity in a marriage can bring.  

Say it Ain't So

She's far away, yet I feel her in my heart right now, right up in my throat actually. He's practically a stranger to me, the great guy I chatted with at our 20th reunion who bought me beer and even glasses of water that I didn't ask for but he knew I wanted.  His name is Bob, and he is battling lymphoma, a battle I NEVER thought he wasn't going to win when I first read about it on her blog.  Her name is Leah, a friend from school; the friend who brought a jello salad spiked with vodka to the 8th grade picnic.  Who knew vodka messed with how jello set up?  Leah threw up all over me in the upper bunk of her parents trailer days later from a continuation of the same shenanigans we were dabbling in.  I've got more on her, but that's for another time.  Outside of a strange 3-way call a mutual friend set up and surprised me with around 2001, we had no contact until we were helping plan our 20th high school reunion.  Since then we've connected through the usual means of the new millenium--Facebook, e-mail, blogging.  And her blog has been amazing and painful to read these past several months as her husband was diagnosed with lymphoma, treated, in remission, sick again, seaking a risky transplant, and now given weeks to live.  This just isn't how it was supposed to play out, yet she continues to write and let us into her most vulnerable places.  We're all still hoping he is going to beat this thing....we're rallying, we're hoping, we're praying, we're sending positive vibes, whatever.  But last night's post was the one that sent us all to our collective knees.  The image of her curled up miserably on her "chofa" at his hospital bedside contemplating--preparing for--the reality that he was leaving this planet and she was staying here alone.  Just typing the words makes my whole body churn.  Did I mention THIS ISN'T HOW THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO GO?  I feel us all crowded in her hospital room with her, we're shoulder to shoulder, butt to butt watching, aching as we watch, and unable to change the outcome or lift the burden from her.  If I could but carry her pain and sorrow for her one hour right now, I would gladly.  I can't do very much, but I can stand in the gap praying for an 11th hour miracle, pray for whatever the future holds for this family and my dear friend, pray that she would have a peace in her heart right now that only God can provide.
If you're reading this, please keep praying for Bob.  It's not over until you know who sings.