When Dad pays up, he really pays up!

About a month ago, Pink accepted a challenge to stay in bed for 30 days in a row - with a reward of a night in a hotel if she could do it.  It turns out that given the appropriate motivation, anything is possible.  We had to sneak in a few "bonus points" to make it to Memorial Day weekend, but last Friday, Pink filled her sticker chart and was rewarded with a night and two days in this:

 The biggest indoor water park I have ever seen - and all of it connected to a hotel.  Fabulous!  We were able to use the water park starting early afternoon Friday, spend the night in the rustic-themed room (and start our day with pajamas, pop tarts, and cartoons)...

 ...and finish with a full day of water slides, lazy river, and wave pool on Saturday. Absolutely fun!

There was also an outdoor pool and more water slides (and yes, I managed to let every person get a sunburn).  Pink still refuses to take her wristband off, and keeps telling us she is going back to the hotel!

Everything I know, I learned in Pre-K.

 As those who have known us for a while realize, we really like going to school.  Since we have been married, we have experienced 4 college graduations. This past week, Blue reached his first educational milestone, with graduation from his Pre-K program.  Despite being a big man on campus, he managed to avoid the late-night parties (bedtime is still 7pm) and binge milk drinking.

Pictured above is the sweetest group of preschoolers one could ever hope to meet, and to the right are his 2 fantastic teachers - Ms. Jen and Ms. Jacee, who proudly taught in room J this year.

 As part of the festivities, the kids performed several songs including "Deep in the Heart of Texas", of course.  In keeping with his Yankee roots, Blue sang with heart and feeling, but had his cowboy hat on backwards.

We are so proud of all that Blue has accomplished - he can read, write his full name, and do basic math.  He is ready for his next adventure: the public school system!

To All the Moms:

It is not surprising to anyone who has ever so much as seen a pregnant woman that carrying and birthing a child is a full-body experience.  That part is a given.  But there is so much more to the full body experience of motherhood than that.  Mothers give their whole bodies to their children.

With her eyes, a Mother sees her newborn baby for the first time, watches her toddler’s first tentative steps, see her child off to school on the first day, watches them dress for their first date, and sees her child shine on their wedding day.  With her ears, she hears that first cry, that first word, she listens to accounts of trials and troubles, to stories of schoolyard spats and hurt teenage feelings.  She listens to her adult children as they venture forth into their own lives, and hears stories of her grandchildren and maybe her great grandchildren. With her lips, she kisses away boo-boos and ouwies, reads countless bedtime stories, teaches principles, and changes the outcome of a bad situation with a smile.  She also bites those lips when she watches her child suffer through something difficult or when she wants to offer advice that she knows is better left for another time.  Perhaps most importantly, with her lips, she prays for her children – for guidance to know how to raise them, for help with struggles, and with gratitude that she is allowed to mother these sweet spirits.

A mother’s arms and hands rock a baby to sleep, hold the uncertain hand of a preschooler, hug a tired teenager, and work, work, work.  Laundry, dishes, and household cleaning are usually a mother’s job too, and she gives herself to these tasks as an act of service, charity, and love to her family.  She throws and catches balls and Frisbees, and twists little girl hair into braids and buns.  Her shoulders are a place of solace for sorrowing children, her shoulders stand proud as she sees her children accomplish things they thought they could not do, and those shoulders stand strong when she is faced with trials that threaten her family.

A Mother's heart is permanently changed by having a child.  The author Elizabeth Stone said, “Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

A mother’s hips may never be quite as svelte as they were before she gave birth, but they make such an excellent shelf for carrying a baby and toddler – and sometimes even a preschooler who just can’t go one more step.  As the mother ages, those are the same hips that often fail, and make it harder to run around with her grandchildren, but easier to sit and enjoy their exuberant youth.

A mother’s feet walk the floor with a fussy infant, teach a toddler how to walk, and play soccer with a growing young boy or girl.  They pace the floor awaiting the sound of a teenager coming in at curfew.  Her feet walk with joy at a graduation ceremony, a wedding ceremony, or walking with her children in their accomplishments. 

A mother’s knees crawl on the floor to encourage her little one to learn to move independently, then crawl some more to race matchbox cars and toy trains around tiny tracks, later, her knees run to keep up with lightning-fast children.  And her knees are used in prayer -  In pleading with our Father to know how to raise his children and how to help them learn and grow.

I am a mother.  To my children and their upbringing, I have given my whole body.  I do it willingly and lovingly.  It was done for me and for each of us by our mothers.


Happy Mother's Day to my Mom, my Friends, and my Friends' Moms, all of whom helped shape me into the mother that I am.

When a child opens a door, her parents want to jump out a window

Am I really about to tell a story about door handles? Yes, yes I am.

A few weeks ago, we had our "looked cool in the 90's" round shiny brass doorknobs replaced with the oiled-bronze beauties pictured below (what does it say about my life that I am so excited about new doorknobs?).  

Since then, we haven't gotten a full night's sleep.  Pink, who was formerly being kept in her room by one of those toddler-proof door locks, can escape from her room at 2am now, and does every single night.

 In my last attempt to save my sanity before I go buy another round doorknob and re-attach it to her door, we are starting a sticker chart today.  See those cute beds?  Every night she stays in bed all night, she gets to put a sticker on one.  Six nights in a row, she earns a lollipop; twelve nights, she gets lunch at chick-fil-a; after a full 30 nights, she gets to go to a hotel.  

The first two of these incentives I understand - she loves candy and those weird nuggets and fries, but that last one I was surprised about.  After some intensive questioning (which is hilarious, since this 3-year-old doesn't really reason yet), it turns out that hotels are fun because:

* you get to watch tv in bed

* they have a pool

* everyone sleeps in the same room

So does this mean that if we work and try and finally get Pink to sleep through the night in her own room for 30 nights in a row, we will completely undo all that effort in the reward? 

Never a dull moment in this parenting game....

Happy Earth Day!

Earth Day!
Torment the bullfrogs...

 Torture the children with a hike in 90-degree humid weather...

Tell Dad about it later!

The big catch up post

It's been almost 4 months since I posted any pictures or any substantive family nonsense (is that an oxymoron?). If I set myself up to chronicle the last 4 months in depth, I'll never do it, so here is one big catch up post and a fervent hope that I might stay on top of our lives a little bit better.

Christmas, 2010:
We continued our tradition of having Santa bring the presents on Christmas Eve.  So much more pleasant (to me) than an early-morning trashing of our living space.  There were plenty of presents to go around, including a very unusual necklace for Red.

January 2011:
After 5 good years, we said farewell to our trusted Labrador Elvis.  He went to live with Red's grandparents in Pennsylvania.  It is an ideal arrangement for everyone - Elvis was slowing down and getting stressed about the rapidly increasing speed of Pink and Blue, and the grandparents, who lost their dog last year, got a well-trained companion. In typical fashion, I didn't take a single picture to commemorate the handing off of our beloved dog, the visit with the kids' great-grandparents, or the car (dubbed "snowflake") rented to take us all on this grand 2500 mile adventure - not even New Year's Eve in Nashville, and a visit to a life-sized replica of the Parthenon.

At least I remembered to pull out the camera a few weeks later when we celebrated Pink turning 3 - or maybe it was her father who had the good sense to take some pictures:

February, 2011.
This month was full of ice and snow, and one major holiday. Which Red and Green celebrated by taking a painting class...and giving the paintings to Pink and Blue for Valentine's Day. Yup, we are an original bunch. But what we lack in originality, we may make up for in ability to follow directions. Note how much our paintings look like the prototype, seen over Red's shoulder.

March, 2011.

Regardless of any wagers taken to the contrary a decade and a half ago (or perhaps to spite the wagerers), we celebrated 15 years of marriage in March.  We attended a Devotchka concert with friends, and, as might be expected of a smallish indoor concert venue, the pictures taken are kind of dim. Lack of photographic evidence notwithstanding, we are still happily married. 

April, 2011.

Apparently, when the sun comes back out, so do the cameras - and the crazy ideas.  I came home from a Friday-afternoon doctor's appointment to find my family frantically throwing clothes into suitcases for a "surprise vacation".  We drove way into the night, and didn't tell the kids where we were going until the next day.  "Bat Cave" and "Hotel Pool" were enough to sell it.

Whew... I feel better now.  I am sure there are a few things I missed, but at least we don't have a gaping hole in the family record.

A big thanks to anyone who made it through all this!

What happened to this blog?

Sometimes, the smallest events can really change my attitude about everything.  Take, for example, the last post on this blog.  I put it up a couple of days before we left town.  It was, for the record, a picture of Red's feet as he fixed a minor leak in a valve on the back of our refrigerator.  One that we discovered after coming home from a week to visit loved ones in Utah at Thanksgiving.  I meant to post something humorous about leaky fridges and and my live-in-handyman.  Of course, I didn't get around to it before we had Christmas (and all of it's associated chaos) and then left town again for a week.  A week from which we returned to a true flood.  A lift-the-carpet-to-dry-it-out kind of flood that leaves a particular texture to hardwood and stains that need to be painted over on walls.

In the midst of cleaning it up and eradicating the sour smell of wet house from the air, I lost my blogging momentum - and my ability to write witty things about small floods.  I blame the sound of the fans and the creeping suspicion that our house might actually not like us very much.  Or at least, not like being left alone.

I've vowed to change (not a vowed like my marriage vow, which I take quite seriously indeed, but more like my "eat less chocolate" vow, which only applies on days that I designate), and I will catch up and keep writing on this blog; if only so that my children will have some written record of what they did during their childhoods. But I'm not writing about floods.