Late Night Thoughts

I had something I was all excited about chatting with you about this evening, names.  But something else has been on my heart for the past few hours.  I imagine it has something to do with this highly emotional series I have been watching on Hulu.com most of the night, but it could also be the looming birthdays of both my girls this month.  It doesn’t seem possible that my Mattie Belle is turning 8.  I remember like it was this morning being pregnant with her and I could walk you through the tiniest of details from the day she was born, if you had a few hours to listen.  For the past 7 years, we have been dining on Chinese food every January 20th because that is the last meal I had before she arrived.  It was a very traumatic birth for both Mattie and I, we were both extremely banged up and the pictures from right after her glorious birth, we both look pretty pitiful.  She has been dramatic ever since.

Please pay no attention to me getting sewn back together behind her. I tried to crop this several times and it just didn’t work. Like I said, traumatic birth.

And Lila, I blinked and a year went by.

So anyway, with thoughts of my girls reaching these milestones and watching a special about ladies giving their babies up for adoption, I am already feeling rather emotional.  And then on episode number 2 of The Baby Wait, an adoptive daddy said something that just struck me like a bolt of lighting.  The adoptive family was pulling out of the hospital parking lot, and the heart-broken birth mama had just said good-bye with only one request, that they give her the best life possible.  This new daddy was telling his wife what a huge responsibility this all was, to have someone voluntarily give their child to you, to hand over their little person and expect that this new family is going to watch over and care for them forever.  I have heard words like that said several times.  And again, I don’t know if it was just the emotions of it all, but the thoughts occurred to me – do we all think of our own babies like that?

These little children, either carried inside of us or someone else, have been given to us a gift.  They are not our possessions, but our little miracles.  They are the closest look and feel at creation that we as humans will ever experience.  You go into a room as one and come out as two.  God gives these little babes to us, they are trusted to us to care for and love and give the best life possible.  I will make a little confession right now, I always love my children.  But I also tend to look at them as just mine, and not as the priceless creation that has been entrusted to me.  Would I treat them differently if I thought that at any moment they could be taken away from me?

I went upstairs and kissed all 3 of them.  For a minute, I lingered over each of them and in that way that only sleeping children can, they took my breath away.

Paper Products, Target Up-Dates and Mattie the Barista

I have been thinking that its time that I start making the kids be a little more responsible.  Be a bit more active in the daily running of this machine that we call home.  Mattie knows how to make her bed already and does it most mornings……unless she is running in super sloth mode and then I tend to do it in the time it takes her to put one sock on.  Reese has a bunk bed that takes a lot of committment to really make, so he is getting by with just straightening up his covers.  I also require that he helps me make mine so he doesn’t falsely believe that making a bed is just pulling the comforter up and covering up the sheet and blanket tangle.

I would really like to start giving them more cleaning responsibilities, but I just haven’t been able to hand over the reins yet.  I know that they have to learn and the first few times, the chore isn’t going to be done to the same standards as how I would do it.  But if my children don’t feel passionately about cleanliness by the time they leave the nest.  If Mattie doesn’t search around her new college dorm room as we are putting away her things and ask if we remembered to get her a toilet brush.  And if Reese doesn’t know how to sort laundry, I feel I would have failed them a bit as a mother.  So starting yesterday, I made it my goal to teach one new skill a week.  I am starting this training with Mattie first, and we will see how apt a pupil she is.  And unbeknownst to Reese,  he is in his apprentice of everything phase.  Mattie’s new skill was………….learning how to make a pot of coffee.  Maybe not the MOST essential skill, but definitely a handy one.  She was a quick study and this morning, after feeding the dog, she hopped up on the counter and began her task of preparing her parents’ morning caffeine.  We might need to get her a little stool in the kitchen, because the climbing of the cabinets was a little treacherous, but overall it was lovely.  I’m anxious to come up with next weeks skill.

In other news, we are a house without paper products.  I don’t know how it always happens like this because it really doesn’t seem like there should be any correlation between the two, but no matter what size of package I buy, we always run out of both toilet paper and paper towels at the same time. We have run out completely in the two downstairs bathrooms and are now dangerously low on the one roll left in the kids’ bathroom.  Theirs is always the last to go, probably because Mattie is the only one who uses that facility and since she’s gone 90% of the day, it just makes sense.  Reese has been begging me to buy the baby angel toilet paper.  I wasn’t sure if this was something that he came up with in a dream or a vision or what, but has been adamant about it.  “Buy the angel baby tissue mommy, it’s the softest.” It was all getting a little confusing and slightly irritating to have my 4-year-old so dead set on a certain toilet tissue and there be no explanation why.  Was he conducting experiments?  Polling people? Turns out it is Angel Soft tissue that he was referring too and there is much advertising for it on the Hallmark Channel, which is what we watched a lot of while at Mumsey’s house.

* I have just recently returned from Target and it is now safe to use the restroom in our home again.  All of the bathrooms are well stocked and ready to go for at least another month or so.  I have two things though to report about from my trip.

1) Those little dresses that I mentioned about a month ago, the Neiman Marcus for TArget dresses, well they are now marked down 70% off (that makes them about $17.50).  This is much more like it, but, I’ve noticed that people still aren’t snatching them up.  I think they are kind of like me where I held one and really looked it over, think that this would be perfect for Lila in a few months.  But then, when she wore it, everyone would recognize it as one of those ridiculously over-priced dresses Target tried to sell last year and they wouldn’t know that I had bought it crazy on sale.  I wouldn’t want people to think that I was foolish in buying a $60 dress at the same place I bought toilet paper.  So I left it there, cute as it was….and apparently so is everyone else.

2) My second report is a lesson that I have learned.  I thought that I was being very wise and frugal and overall smart by putting myself on a Target diet for the 2 weeks before Christmas.  And for the most part, I probably was.  But by not visiting, I missed out on something.  I guess during that tiny little window, there was a darling little nautical sweater in the toddler boys section.  I spotted this sweater while doing a little after christmas shopping with Mumsey at her Target in Arkansas, but I figured it was brand new and I would just wait and pick it up when I got home.  Turns out it is gone in all the Target stores here in Memphis and it is never coming back.  Now, my boy needs a new sweater about as much as he needs a new belly button.  However, this mama loves her boy in some navy and white nautical stripes and I know that my days of dressing him how I want are numbered.  Actually, I love dressing anything in nautical stripes – anyone, anything.  So I could just kick myself for benching myself during that time period.  Here is the link to the sweater though and maybe one of you readers out there might happen upon it at your Target, and if so, maybe you would like to purchase it for a certain little boy (actually his mama, but the boy will be the one wearing it.) Thank you ahead of time.

http://www.target.com/p/genuine-kids-from-oshkosh-infant-toddler-boys-sweater/-/A-14263562#prodSlot=medium_1_1&term=toddler%20sweaters

And on that note, I should probably head off.  I’ve got to go pick up kid #1 from school.  You guys have a great day and let’s talk about names tomorrow!

 

Socks and Birthdays

Lila has a thing for socks.  She enjoys taking hers off all the time, sometimes within seconds of me putting them on.  I’m really not even sure why I bother, except for the principal of it all.  So that when the elderly woman sneer at me at the grocery store, while muttering things under their breath regarding mothers these days, at least I know I did attempt to keep my child’s feet warm.

Once removing the socks, she loves to play with them.  Often hanging onto the one pair all day.  She carries them with her in her car seat, which is actually quite nice because then the muttering old women see that there are at least socks present in her life.  I will hear her waking from her nap and there she will be standing, happy as a little clam with those socks in her hands, gripped as tightly as she can while she also tries to hold onto the rail.  It’s almost more than she can handle when I just let her rummage around through her sock basket.  Socks are her thing….I don’t know if that may one day bleed into shoes.  And if so, I really can’t blame her.

I try to make sure that her socks always match whatever she’s wearing, even if they won’t actually be worn on her feet, they will still be attached to her in some capacity.  Socks are her thing.  Today, she has been carrying one of Brandon’s around.  She found it crumpled up on the floor by the couch this morning and it has been her steady companion since about 9:30 this morning.  I’m not sure if I should be a little grossed out by this (and maybe should have tried harder to take it away from her), but instead, I thought it was sort of precious.

Mattie is back in school now, the christmas tree is down and I just ordered birthday invitations for both of the girls.  We are officially out of the holiday season and into the new year.  Its funny, back in the days that I thought I had any sort of control over my life, I always thought that I would NEVER have my children in the months near Christmas or in the summer.  Near Christmas just seemed like putting your two prime gift giving occasions way too close together and summertime, no one is around to go to your party and you can’t get to take cupcakes to school.  Sure they often let you pick a month when you want to celebrate your birthday during the year, or you celebrate your half birthday.  But truly, it’s just not the same.  I’m really proud of myself that not only did I manage to do both of those things that I said I would NEVER do.  So when number 3 came around, I was really excited that she too would have a near Christmas birthday and to make it even better, it would be exactly a week after her sister’s.  In the back of my brain, ever since she was born, I have been trying to figure out if I should have Lila share a birthday party with her sister.  This year it seemed wrong, being her first birthday and all.  So here I am now trying to plan two completely different parties, trying to keep them as simple and yet picture perfect as possible.  I don’t like that about myself.  I put too much weight on things that really are going to be memorable and lovely just because of what they are, not because of the cupcake toppers I pick out.

But before we rush on to her birthday, let’s savour Lila’s month number 11.  Just a little snippet of our attempt at a photo shoot today.