Mommy Life

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Man, I love a toddler.

Especially mine.

I just saw sweet little hands uncurl around a big lava rock, a pile of colored rubber bands, and a broken piece of a sparkly geode as he left his treasures on the counter in order to grasp a water cup with both hands.

I leave drinking cups on the counter for the big boys, and Emmett always has to drink out of them both. “I firsty,” and he holds up a hand. Drinks long. Puts the cup back. “I firsty,” and he holds up his hand for the other cup, too.

He loves to say “chicken,” and his two favorite uses are “poopy chicken” and “chicken house.” He said “poopy chicken” out loud at least four times during his Aunt Nikki's graduation, but hopefully no one was able to decipher it.

That aside, he’s very polite. Help him with something, and he’s sure to say “tanks” at least twice, if not three times. When I pray with him at bedtime, he says, “Thank you, Mom,” only it’s so fast and clipped that it sounds like “Tay tu, Mom.” When he wants something and is afraid of not getting it, he says, “Peas, peas, peas!”

He loves to copy his brothers in the things they do and say, and the other day when we were in the car, he was mimicking literally everything they said. He gets goofy right alongside them, and there is so much hooting and hollering and laughing. ...continue reading →

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I've had the bulk of this post just sitting here because I wasn't sure how to preface it. I wrote about three different intros, and they all had to do with being eleven, and it was slightly disjointed and a little strange, and I just wasn't happy with it.

And then I remembered . . . nine years ago today . . . a Starbucks that no longer exists, a rainy night, a doodled-on coffee cup, a handsome boy, and a "yes" finally leaving my lips after literally months and months of praying.

Eric and I met at a Starbucks so I could give him the answer to the question he'd asked two days earlier.

The answer was absolutely yes, and we've been together ever since. 🙂

Those were wonderful days. Dating was wonderful. Being engaged was pretty good, too. Being newly married was amazing.

And then came the children, and more tastes of real life, but guess what . . . I didn't ever want to go back to those dating days or even those newly married days.

This life right here is my favorite yet.

And that's where the feeling an affinity to being eleven came in.

When I was eleven, I wasn't yet interested in the future . . . in driving or graduating or working or boys or marriage or children. I wasn't looking forward to anything major. I also wasn't old enough to be very interested in the past . . . to look back at anything with nostalgia. I was just living in the moment, happy with what I had right then and there.

I kind of feel like I’m there again. I'm not waiting for anything major. Not to graduate; I’ve done that. Not to date; I’ve done that. Not to get married; I’ve very, very happily done that. Not to have children; I’ve done that. There's really nothing major that I'm waiting for (except maybe having a daughter, but that doesn't count because I do have my boys).

And any looking back that I do, while done with fondness, is with the understanding that nothing I ever had before can top everything I have now.

I guess that’s why they call it the good old days.

Not looking forward, not looking back. There’s not some time in the past that I wish I could return to. I'm not chomping at the bit to get to some time in the future. Right here, right now, is just fine with me.

These are the days I'll miss.

These are the good old days.

What an incredible privilege to get to live them in peace and quietness. ...continue reading →

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Almost two months ago, I was trying to catch up on my stash of WORLD magazines and came across a book review that piqued my interest so much that I literally grabbed my phone and ordered the book on Amazon. I couldn’t wait for it to arrive.

It was supposed to come the day before we left to go camping with Ian and Abby, and I imagined lounging in a camp chair reading all day long while my baby played happily in the dirt.

The book came; I took it camping; our campsite was on a slope; my baby trundled around precariously and had to be watched every moment; I did almost literally no lounging in a camp chair; the book remained untouched. (That’s okay, we had a lot of fun without getting any reading done.)

So I just started reading the book here and there in the small pockets of time I had where I didn’t feel like doing anything else. And it didn't disappoint. In fact, literally five minutes after I finished it, I printed Sebastian a bazillion train pictures to color like he’d been incessantly asking me to do, and then I closed out the coloring pages tab, and I opened Word, and I started to write.

It was that good.

I had hoped it would be. ...continue reading →

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I've had a story on my mind for a while now, a story from a year ago that I had decided I'd like to write out and post exactly a year after it happened. Well, I got my dates wrong, and by the time I realized my mistake that one-year mark was past. So I guess it can be a year to the month instead. 🙂

It's kind of a crazy story, about an absurdly hard day I had with my boys, and I couldn't quite decide if I should even share it. I wrote it out and read it to my boys, and at first they were all enthusiastic about me sharing it.

But then they actually heard the story, and they heard what their old selves had done, and those vibrant smiles got a little more sober, and the laughter came a little more haltingly, and at the end when I asked again if they minded if I shared it, they both immediately shouted no.

Alec said, with big, somber eyes, "Word would spread."

Oh, dear boy . . . I am no advocate for sharing dirt on my children, no matter how naughty they can be sometimes.

I reassured the boys that I would make sure people knew that these were things they had done when they were much younger and that I was so glad they didn't do things like that anymore. I told them they had grown up a lot since then and that I would make sure people knew that.

But I also really wanted to share the story because the more I thought about it, the more I thought maybe it could be encouraging to another mother in the same shoes. Not just a "this too shall pass," not just a "been there done that," but an honest "what you're doing is really, really hard, and it doesn't always feel like you're doing it well, and it often feels like it will never end, but it will get easier, and your children will grow in both age and maturity, and there will be different challenges as that happens, but it won't always be this level of unending crazy." ...continue reading →