Monthly Archives: April 2011

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Refusal

A certain little boy who shall remain anonymous to protect the guilty REFUSES to walk.  We are rather convinced that he could do it because he can walk while holding one or two of our fingers for support and he can stand on his own.  But nothing will deter him from his belief that crawling is the way to go.  He’ll stand forever and then drop into a crawl at lightning speed.  He’ll walk with our support and then let go to drop down and crawl.  Baby, crawling is where it is AT!

We are fine with him not walking on his own because as soon as he does, our world will get four more degrees of crazy.  Cute crazy, of course, but craaaaa-zeeeeeee!  We get it, Little Guy.  We respect your decision.  It’s your choice.  Mommy reserves the right to continue trying to entice you to walk, though!  I love to hold something AMAZING in front of him when he is standing to see if he will come and get it.  So far, a balloon or “Baboom!!!” as he calls it was unsuccessful.  I thought that one was a sure thing!  And Gus, our neighbor’s golden retriever, didn’t inspire him either!  We set him up in a standing position just 2-3 steps from the exciting something and see if he’ll go for it.  And he will go for it… but with crawling.

I hesitate to give you the evidence because you might identify the deliciousness and our little boy’s anonymity will be ruined.  But it’s so cute and I just can’t help myself.  Behold…

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My Favorite Student

I worked as a speech-language pathologist in a school for 2 years… my first real job after graduation from graduate school.  I loved it there, mostly because I LOVED those kids.  They were very broken… it was a school for kids with severe emotional and behavioral disorders.  I saw my role less as an SLP and more as a safe adult… perhaps one of the few safe adults those kids would ever encounter!

It’s not okay to have favorites, but I had one.  My favorite student had a bright smile and some sweet Michael Jackson dance moves.  He was small and quick and bright, but just could not express himself without using physical force.  He didn’t have the words to describe all the pain he’d experienced in his short life, but he tried.  We worked on that.  He loved dogs and I did too.  He used to ask me to take him online on my office computer to the Dept. of Corrections so that he could see his dad’s mug shots because he had never met him.  It was heart breaking.

After I moved on to a new job at the university, I saw him one day as I was driving past his neighborhood.  He needed a ride to school and I was so thrilled to see him.  He looked good and he told me he was trying really hard to do better in school.  I loved that little guy.  I remembered when he became a Christian in my office… it wasn’t a Christian school, but our principal was a Christian and many of us who worked there were as well.  I couldn’t initiate spiritual conversations with students but I had express permission to answer any question honestly and if the kids wanted to talk about Jesus, I was welcome to follow their lead.  We prayed together, him and I, and his bright smile lit up when he asked Jesus to be his Lord and Savior.  He was excited to go to church and worried that he didn’t have anything to wear.  One of the teachers offered him her son’s outgrown suit and that amazing smile lit up again.  I never followed up with him to disciple him and teach him about the Lord.

Tonight, I looked through the Illinois Department of Corrections website to see if any of my kids were incarcerated.  I was so excited that none of them were!  Then I got to the end of my alphabetical list of names, and there was my little guy.  Imprisoned at the age of 19 years with an 18 year sentence.  Half his life will be spent behind bars.  I’m heart broken.  I know he made some poor choices, but he never really had a chance!  Neither of his parents were present in his life and his grandfather loved him and cared for him, but he was old and always at work and couldn’t give my student the attention he needed.  I loved my therapy sessions with this guy because he was a delight.  He was SO excited to get out of class and come have one-on-one time with me.  He craved attention and love and I always felt guilty for leaving after only 2 years of investing in his life.

I wish I had thought of looking him up several years ago and loving on him and rebuilding my status as a safe adult with him.  I wish I knew him now.   We have a local corrections facility, but that isn’t where he is incarcerated.  He is too far away and I can’t get to him and I know he is alone because I assume his grandfather has passed away by now.  He is 20 years old now.  And he doesn’t know that I loved him and that I still do.  I don’t really know what can be done, but I’m so very sad.

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Easter 2011 – Part 2

*Nathaniel is recovering well and continues to climb onto the couch and attempt to do this all over again.  We are working on turning around backwards to get down to prevent future crashes.*

Back to Easter!  On Saturday evening, I twisted Rissa’s hair into pincurls, just like my Mommy used to do for me.  I was worried that she wouldn’t be able to sleep because those things can poke!  But she found a position to lay her head and told me that if she held very still, this would work.  My awesome girl!  She was excited to watch Shrek on TBS while I did her hair.

On Sunday morning, I headed to the grocery store early that morning to buy our meal.  Oops, apparently, I’m a bit last minute this year!  I felt awful that the staff had to work today and so early in the morning but I was also very grateful that they did or we would have been eating pbj sandwiches for Easter!  I got home and started making the food and two little cuties decided to help me!

Tim and Catherine were driving down to see us and I thought they would meet us at church.  But they arrived at our house while we were still getting ready!  That was a welcome surprise.  We managed to get everyone into their Easter outfits (adults included!) and out the door.  We weren’t early or on time, but we were only BARELY late.

The service was beautiful and we were reminded that Jesus’ resurrection calls us to do 3 things:  repent, believe, and live.  Jesus’ claim that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life doesn’t mean that He is a doorway that we walk through by repenting and believing and that’s it until some future moment of heaven dwelling.  He is the Way, the road on the journey to God.  We are to live on that way!  This was a great reminder for those of us who have trusted Jesus for many years… there is so much more walking with Him to do!  We live the Gospel as we continue to walk along the way; not just believe it long ago at a salvation moment or confirmation moment or baptism moment.  Walking with Jesus transforms us every day, little by little, and impacts all that we are and all that we have.  We don’t walk with Him to get a ticket into heaven.  That’s a misguided and incomplete picture of the Gospel.  We walk with Him to be with Him – to be saved and transformed now!

After the service, we engaged in the sort of activities that can only be justified by ridiculously cute children.  I’ll let you see for yourselves…

Then we wrangled the kids into heading home for lunch.  I had forgotten to plug in the crock pot for the first hour that I thought our meal was cooking, but thankfully, I realized this well before we left for church and it still had 2.5 hours at high to cook our lunch!  The microwave finished the rest.

Then the kids took their naps and we got to play Puerto Rico.  I was certain that I had won until Matt stealthily announced his victory at the game’s end.  Tim and Catherine tied so they incorporated the tie-breaker round and tied again.  Catherine drove her car down and claimed to win because she could drive home.  But Tim had the keys.  Tied again. 🙂  When the kids woke up, we had the Easter Egg hunt and decorated some eggs.  I couldn’t find our Bunny Ears headbands from last year or most of the Easter eggs, but I found 12, so we loaded them with Goldfish crackers and hid them in the playroom while Tim and Catherine entertained the kids.  My mom is amazing at setting up Easter egg hunts.  She is famous for hiding things in extremely easy-to-find places and then stumping us with impossibly hard hiding spots for others!  We tried to set it up how she would.

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My baby!!!

This morning started out okay.  Matt and I had a hard talk.  This was unpleasant because hard talks are never pleasant.  But it was super easy as hard talks go because it was NOT about our relationship.  Collective sigh of relief!  Those talks are necessary and turn up every so often, but lately, we are doing really really good.  We are a team.  We are in love.  We stand united as a superhero partnership and fight off evils like cancer and stress and parenting issues and house issues.  Okay, we don’t actually fight those things off because they’re still around and pestering us.  But we hold out like champion boxers until the billionth round and have established ourselves as the “you’ll wear yourself out trying to mess with us because we’re together and we can take it!” couple.  Yay us.  Hard talks about our future house and our current house are trying to undo us but we will stand strong!

Zach followed me around this morning while Rissa watched pbskids.  I think it is cute how Zach will establish together time just by being in close proximity.  If we are in the same room, we are hanging out!  I like it too.  Until he went to visit his baby brother after Nathaniel’s morning nap and squirted moisturizing hand sanitizer all over the carpet.  That was fun to clean up… with a spoon.  Other than that, a fun morning.  We played.  We ate lunch.  Everyone went down for a nap.  I got some Jaime time.

And then there was a knock on my front door.

I almost didn’t answer it because I wasn’t expecting anyone.  I was wearing “stay home” clothes that I wouldn’t wear out in public and didn’t feel like answering the door in a tank top.  My boobs/cleavage are only for me and for Matt, thanks.  But I went ahead and opened the door and a realtor whispered, “Hi.  We’re here to see your house?  Did your realtor tell you that we were coming?”  I stammered something along the lines of “Um, no, I must not have gotten the message.  And my kids are napping…”  His client, a kind looking man in the 40-50 age range, looked extremely disappointed and I thought “Eh, what the heck.  I just hosted Easter yesterday and we had 3 showings in the days prior to that… my house is still reasonably clean, right?”  I smiled my brightest smile, tucked my cleavage behind the door so that it wasn’t visible, and said, “You know what, sure, you can see the house.  Can you give me a few minutes?  Feel free to sit on the porch swing or look around outside while I clean up just a little bit and get my kids.”  They agreed (and looked relieved!) and I started DASHING around.  And then I remembered this:

That was fine and cute and all, but they completely trashed the table surface and I suspect they were pretending to feed the geese in the water because shreds of food were tossed on the floor around the table too.  AND I DIDN’T CLEAN IT UP AFTER LUNCH.  Uh oh, my house isn’t so “show-ready” – or do people not mind if you have food all over the floor anymore?  Well, I’ll get to that in a minute!  I need to toss all the dirty laundry into the laundry hamper.  I walked into the laundry room and there was a trickle of water spraying and a puddle on the floor.  My washer was still on and trying to run a load.  AUUUUGGGHHHHHH!!!  THERE IS A MAN OUTSIDE ON MY PORCH SWING WHO MIGHT WANT TO BUY MY HOUSE AND MY WASHER EXPLODES????  I swore a little bit and pulled the machine away from the wall to take a look.  This was a mistake, because it turns out that the wall was blocking some of the water flow.  Now I had a giant spray of water right into my face, which incidentally, makes it IMPOSSIBLE to see what’s going on behind the washer!  I turned off the washer and the spray continued dousing me.  In a flash of genius, it occurred to me to shut down the water main.  I did, and the spray fizzled out.  I used 6 or so bath towels to mop it up, tossed them into the hamper on top of the clothes I brought in, and took an awake and intrigued Nathaniel into the playroom to hang out with Rissa.  Then I ran around like crazy, picking up the big chunks of lunch from the floor and using my Swivel Sweeper to catch the rest.  And then in my second panic-induced stroke of genius, I whipped out a table cloth and covered all of the hard boiled egg shell pieces, beans, chunks of cheese, peas, and milk splatters under the shiny veneer of purple vinyl.  Add a centerpiece – voila!

I zipped on a sweater to cover my tank top so that I was decent, invited the guys in, and woke up Zach-a-bean, who had turned he and Rissa’s clothing buckets into a cave for him to hibernate in.  There was size 3T clothing EVERYWHERE on the floor.  Oh well!  The kids and I hung out in the playroom and I gave them sippies and snacks while internally chanting, “Washer, don’t explode.  Not now.  Washer, don’t explode.  Not now.  Washer…”  The realtor came back to the playroom to find me and said, “Hi, did you know that your laundry room has water all over the floor?”  Oh crap.  I smiled ruefully and said, “Yeah.  That’s why I needed a few minutes to clean up when you got here.  This has never happened before, but it was leaking while my load was running.”  I still don’t know which response would have been worse:  the honest “yep, I know” or a frantic and obviously fake “WUHHH??????”  I went ahead and told them where the basement door was and honestly announced, “I’m guessing there is water dripping down there too, just so you don’t freak out!”  Six towels was NOT going to mop up the water from a full washer so I knew that at least some of the water must have headed down.

When they came back upstairs, the kindly prospective buyer told me exactly where the water was dripping and said he moved my shredder out of the stream for me.  Nice guy.  Shockingly, he seemed nonplussed.  He looked like a “I can totally fix that for you, ma’am” guy and had a few questions for me about other “perks” he had noticed in my character-filled old home.  I told him a couple of our tricks for dealing with those sweet, quirky “features” and he nodded as if that sounded reasonable.  I love this guy!  My washer is exploding and I have a water-soaked face from the spray and he’s nodding and smiling as if my ideas for how to get around these cute little issues would work just fine for him!

They left and I called Matt, who immediately apologized because our washer has been on the fritz for several months now and he suspected the hose in the back might blow in the near future.  Of course, this happened DURING a showing that I didn’t know about!  I checked my voicemail, and yep, there was the call from my realtor asking if this would work.  I just had no idea.  I was so wrapped up in enjoying my Jaime time to scrapbook some pictures that I didn’t hear the phone ring!  Matt was proud of how I handled it.  If that nice man buys our house (he didn’t even seem to notice the primary thing that turns all the other prospective buyers off to purchasing our house!), I’m going to send him something.  Matt suggested manly flowers.  I think a bouquet of electrical wiring and PVC pipes and conduit arranged smartly with a cute ribbon would do just the trick!

I told Matt that I’d talk to him later during the next crisis, ha ha.  I described Thanny-man’s antics to him… our little man climbed onto the couch all by himself!  After taking his pants off, of course.  He typically has one bare foot and one foot with a sock and shoe.  And he LOVES to take off his pants and throw them.  At almost every nap and at other times too!  He tosses things out of his crib as entertainment then yells “Mamamamamamamamamamama!” to entice me to come and retrieve his blankie and monkey (he’d rather I leave the pants, the sock, and the shoe on the floor where he threw them.  He figures he is set with the other sock and shoe and his diaper).

I hung up with Matt and glanced at Nathaniel who was SO happy playing on the couch.  And I went to call Ramona who had invited us over to play this afternoon because we weren’t going to make it in time after the washer explosion and surprise house-showing fiasco.  And then I heard Nathaniel crying so I went back down to check on him.  And my heart stopped.

I’m great to have around in an emergency because I go into a very focused, very task-oriented, very step-by-step problem-solving mode.  I stay calm and I do what needs to be done and I make sure everyone has something to do besides freak out.  I told Zach and Rissa that Baby got hurt and we had to go to the doctor and to get on their shoes and go to the van.  And they did it, my little angels!  And I told them that I was very concerned and I would need lots of help at the doctor’s office because I was scared about Baby.  And I was.  But this instantly kicked in their protective natures and they both assured me that they would take care of me!  I got hugs and kisses and someone said, “Don’t worry, Mommy, you are safe with us.  We will take care of you!”  I told them that I was always glad to have a doctor and a firefighter on hand and thanked them for being brave.  This kept them from flipping out at Nathaniel’s bloody face.  And then I called my pediatrician and left a message with the nurse that I was driving there right now and they may as well schedule me an appointment because we were coming and my baby was bleeding and they WILL HELP ME!  And then I called Matt and told him the rest – the part about how it was my fault because my inner voice asked, “should you leave Nathaniel on the couch by himself?” and I stupidly answered that he’d be fine.  And he wasn’t.  And how going into calm, focused emergency mode is great for everyone else because I’m so decisive and nonplussed but that it costs me EVERYTHING emotionally because all I want to do is snuggle my 3 babies and cry in desperation.  But I can’t because I’m calm, focused Jaime and I don’t have the luxury of freaking out.  It’s very hard for me to pull that off, though no one else would ever know it.

And my pediatrician was already gone for the day because of course it was almost 5pm and I think he heads out at 4:30.  So we went to convenient care.  And Matt left work, drove all the way over, and still made it into our examination room before the doctor did.  They were running behind.

Nathaniel is fine.  (Thank you, Lord Jesus!)

After he stopped screaming, he went back to being his normal happy self but he couldn’t figure out why his lip was being weird when he sucked his fingers or why his hand was sticky and red every time he put it in his mouth.  He has a cut inside his nose and he bit his lip and it swelled up like crazy.  But he was smiling and talking and trying to coerce the doctor into letting him hold the stethoscope and the fiberoptic light.  He cried when we looked in his mouth to check his teeth and to make sure he didn’t have anything more than a cut lip.  Zach and Rissa came over to hold his hand.

I hope today does NOT go on my Mommy Resume.  Actually, let’s just strike it from the record, shall we?  We headed to Kindermusik afterward – we were late but we still made it in time to have fun with Miss Brandi.  And then Daddy, my biggest hero, sweetly said, “Let’s go to Quizno’s for dinner!  Do you want to eat INSIDE???”  “Yeahhhhh!!!!!” we all squealed.

And then we got home, got our kids in bed, and Matt headed back out to find us a new washing machine while I wrote up the abysmal details of today.  The end.

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Easter 2011 – Part 1

We had a very full, very fun weekend celebrating Jesus’ Kingship over life, death, sin, and separation from God.

On Saturday, we drove out to the Watkins’ home for the afternoon to participate in the annual TCBC Egg Hunt for kids.  Rissa is absolutely in love with egg hunting.  Last year when Nathaniel was a newborn, Grammy bought Rissa some plastic Easter eggs and received several requests from the kids to “hide” them in our house after putting Goldfish crackers inside.  And then we had our first Egg Hunt experience last spring at the Watkins and Gramma and Granpa were there too and it was SO fun! So we went back this year.

I think I had better introduce this next set of the pictures lest you all think that I have lost my mind!  Or maybe I have…  I didn’t take a picture of the entire structure, but Dick recovered some old playground equipment and built a 3 story climbing utopia for kids and adults alike.  The bottom floor is on stilts so that the horse swing that Rissa was riding (recovered from a tire) hangs from underneath.  The second floor has an enclosed room with a door and a ladder going up and a slide going down.  And the third floor is only accessible by a ladder bolted to the frame.  It has a banister all the way around and several deck chairs on top.  We’ve done the slide before and that was awesome.  And we’ve been to the little enclosed room with windows.  But we’ve never gone to the top… until now.