Allow me to introduce you to our friends, Sam and Joanne.  They enjoy Jesus, music, and spending time with international students, as well as board games, card games, and ice cream from Jarling’s.  Best of all, they regularly enjoy these things with us.  They often come over right after we send the Tinies to bed and we secretly party with games and ice cream until the late hour of 11pm until we all drag ourselves back to reality and the necessity of getting up for work in the morning.  If we haven’t gotten the kids upstairs yet when they arrive, these sorts of exchanges occur:

Rissa:  Why are Miss Joanne and Mr. Sam here? We’re going to bed!
me:  We’re going to play games with them.  We do all of our fun things after you guys go to bed.  Did you know that?
kids:  {blink, blink}
Z:  No…
me:  Oh.  Well, in that case, I’m just kidding.  We wash dishes and do laundry.  It’s very boring.  Okay, off to bed!

Joanne is also Miss Joanne.  She taught the Explorers (ages 2-3) class at our church while the twins were in it.  They were so sad to move on to the preschool class because Explorers is pretty much the best place on earth.  They learn about Jesus.  They have a snack.  They learn truth from the Bible.  They have a slide!

Unfortunately, I do not have pictures of Nathaniel’s first time at Explorers.  We did a lot of traveling in Fall 2012 for family weddings and birthdays etc.  But he loved it too, largely because he loves Miss Joanne.  And… when he moved up to the Discovery Zone (ages 4-5) class in August 2013, Miss Joanne moved with him!

Miss Joanne teaches music lessons from her home.  Ever since we received a digital keyboard from Gramma and Granpa for Christmas, Zach has been in love with playing the piano.  He pecked out Twinkle Twinkle Little Star until he got it on his own!  Matt and I knew we couldn’t afford extracurriculars until a) we weren’t paying for preschool for TWO children simultaneously, and b) I was working and making some extra money for extras.  I started working in April 2013.  We stopped paying for preschool for the twins in May 2013.  And we started piano lessons with Miss Joanne in June 2013!

In April, once I had my job, I asked the kids an important question:

me:  I’m going to ask Rissa first.  Riss, do you want to take piano lessons?  And learn how to play the piano?  You’ll go to a teacher to learn things, then you come home and practice every day on the things you learn.  Then you visit the teacher again, then more practice.
Rissa:  Hmm.  {thoughtful silence} Yeah.  I do want to learn.
Me:  Great!  Zach, now I’m going to ask you…
Zach:  TWO FUMBS UP!
Me:  practice every day?
Zach:  YEAH!
Me:  Okay. Let’s start this summer.  So… Miss Joanne teaches piano…
Both:  YES! We will go to HER house and you and Nathaniel will have to wait for us while we learn! We say YES!

Once the kids found out that Miss Joanne would be their piano teacher, Zach said, “Mom, now I know that piano teachers are REALLY nice to kids.”  She redeems her whole profession!

Miss Joanne IS incredibly nice and wonderful with kids.  But she is strict too, and Matt and I appreciate that.  The kids have to practice at least 6 days per week, no exceptions.  I keep a chart for them.  When they reach 100 days of (nearly consecutive) practice, they get a trophy.  Let me repeat that:  a TROPHY!  Which is pretty much the most brilliant plan any music teacher has ever imagined!  I wish I had ever earned trophies for my 9 years of piano lessons/practice!  Miss Joanne is a genius.  I am rescued from harrassing my children to practice… they already want to!  They are rescued from any flitting thoughts of quitting because it is hard… a TROPHY is in their near future!  And if they miss any days, their count goes back to zero and they have to start over.  The promise of those trophies made piano lessons a fun and exciting addition to our home this summer rather than a stressful one!

As expected, Zach took to piano like a duck to water.  Rissa really struggled at first.  It was hard to train her tiny fingers to play one at a time.  Such fine motor control is exhausting and difficult to learn!  (Thankfully, she felt immensely successful elsewhere:  she took to swimming lessons this summer like a duck to water, and Zach really struggled to keep up.  It worked out perfectly because we were able to talk about their individuality and how each person is working on their own struggles, even when they are very good at something else that comes easily to them!)  After 5 or so lessons, Rissa improved by leaps and bounds!  Miss Joanne had to restrain Zach’s zest just a bit… he was getting ahead of himself in the book and was playing everything at lightning speed by memory and by listening to it rather than by actually reading the music.  The kids regularly checked their practice charts as the numbers crept toward the 70’s, then 80’s, and into the 90’s!

On September 29, Miss Joanne made a special date with us at Jarling’s.  The kids did not know that we were going to see her and Mr. Sam there.  They arrived right before us and were sitting at a picnic table when we walked up.  Miss Joanne and Mr. Sam told the kids to go check out the flower basket.

Because Miss Joanne hooked the kids up right on their hundredth day of practice, they were able to take their trophies to show and tell at school!  Zach has show and tell on Mondays.  He found a place in his room to display his trophy and wanted to sleep with it, but then he remembered that he would need it at school the next day.  So he packed it safely in his backpack to be ready.  The next morning, we read a note in his homework folder that his teacher was implementing a new plan to showcase an alphabet letter each week at show and tell.  This week was brought to Zach by the letter S.  Now, I’m usually a stickler for rules, but the thought of breaking Zach’s heart and telling him he couldn’t bring his trophy after all was atrocious.  And who knows when the T week would be???  Were they doing a new letter every day or every week?  I tried as hard as I could to think of a synonym for trophy that started with an S and turned up nothing.  So I went to thesaurus.com and found “souvenir” and “symbol.”  I wrote “symbol” on a post-it and stuck it to the trophy and smiled my cutest anarchist smile as I sent my exuberant boy to school.

When he got home, I asked Zach if he participated in show the tell.  The little stinker has an amazing flair for dramatic story-telling (wonder who he gets THAT from???) and wouldn’t say!  He said that his teacher said, “Boys and girls, what is this?  And what does a trophy start with?”  They all chimed in together, “T!”  She said,  “Zach, I’m sorry but your trophy doesn’t start with an S.”  I was nearly in tears at the thought that she didn’t let him participate, but we had practiced his response (just read the post-it note, okay, Buddy?).  And my dramatic story-teller said, “So I told her, ‘Uh huh! It’s a SYMBOL for SOMETHING. Those are S words!'”  And he marched proudly up to introduce his classmates to the wonder of hard work and reward provided by the amazing Miss Joanne.  I was SO PROUD of him – we have been working with him on being assertive!

Rissa has show and tell on Friday, so she had to wait 5 whole days to take her trophy in.  Thankfully, there were no criteria regarding the Letter of the Week in her class, because I wasn’t sure I could handle another near miss!  She proudly showed her trophy and we proudly congratulated her on all of her hard work to become proficient at piano!  After months of practice, they are both doing well and work hard every week.

Last night, the twins played at their very first recital.  It was epic.  They chose their songs and have been practicing diligently (both of them are up to 140 days of practice now!).  Rissa decided to have Miss Joanne accompany her at the recital; Zach decided to play his song alone.  Then a week beforehand, he asked Miss Joanne to accompany him.  He has been nervous for months:  “People might LOOK at me, Mom!  While I’m playing, they will WATCH!  Do you think everyone could close their eyes?”  Nathaniel and I came into the music studio room for several weeks in a row during their lesson so that we could be the audience and they could play for us and practice bowing after they were finished.  We are very good at applause!

Both of our kids did a wonderful job.  They each had a tiny mishap:  Zach missed a note and Rissa lost a shoe on her way up onto the stage.  But Zach picked right back up where he left off and kept playing!  That’s the most important thing – to continue instead of get flustered!  When he sat down, he whispered that he made a mistake and I assured him that no one even noticed because he kept playing and did a wonderful job.  It helped him immensely to notice that several other students, even older students, also made mistakes.  No problem – everyone did their best!  Rissa was concerned that the audience laughed when she had to head back down the stairs to retrieve her shoes – were they laughing at her?  We told her that she smiled such a big smile when her shoe popped off and everyone in the audience enjoyed how well she handled her mishap – that’s why they laughed.  I’m actually grateful for their mishaps.  Achieving perfection is too much pressure for anyone!  In my opinion, it’s better to stumble a bit, pull yourself back up, and be strong enough to move on than to nail it.  Now they can feel improved when those mishaps don’t happen at future recitals.

I need to show a tangential picture before I give you the rest of the cuteness from last night:

Matt and Rissa MATCHED for the recital!  I bought matching disco costumes for Matt and me from Halloween clearance a few years ago.  We still haven’t worn them.  Rissa planned to wear her Christmas dress to the recital, a black velvet/black and white plaid formal frock with red ribbons.  I showed her a new outfit that my friend Yvonne passed along from her daughter Lydia, and Rissa loved it!  And then I remembered that Daddy would match her perfectly!  I just mentioned that she and Daddy could decide if they wanted to match, and Rissa was so excited at the prospect of matching with Daddy!  She put on the outfit, grabbed a matching barrette and those silver sparkle shoes provided by my friend Heather (passed along from her daughter Annie), and looked amazing.  And most amazing of all:  Matt WORE THE SHIRT!!!  It is painful to him to be in the spotlight, but for the sake of his beloved daughter, he wore a disco shirt (that he had to safety-pin shut because it is intentionally missing 3 buttons to show off his hairy chest) to a recital.  Even though all of the other parents stared.  He is so brave and such a superstar daddy!  Rissa was delighted.  And someday, she’ll look at this picture and have a better understanding of what it cost her daddy to do this for her.  She is loved, this little angel of ours.  She is loved.

On to the rest of the pictures!

If I manage to get our movies posted, you’ll *see* them each give a sweet bow at the end of their performance.  But if they won’t post, then at least you can imagine it.

Today was destined to be a total disaster.  And then it wasn’t.  I’ve highlighted the places where being part of a community saved my bacon.  Check it out.

It occurred to me yesterday that I scheduled an unreschedulable doctor’s appointment at the same time as Zach and Rissa’s piano lessons.  (Sidenote:  piano lessons have been AWESOME!  The kids are flourishing under the watchful eye and expertise of Miss Joanne and they LOVE to play the keyboard that Gramma and Granpa gave to us!)  I mentioned this to Matt and he said that he could help somehow… what do we need to do to make this work?

I assured him that if I dropped the twins off at Miss Joanne’s house just a few minutes early, they could sit quietly while Nathaniel and I rushed out to Mahomet (20 minutes away).  And if my doctor was as timely as he ALWAYS is, we could rush back in time to pick up the twins.  An hour should be plenty.  I should be back with the twins at 10:30am and home by 11am when Miss Jill brought her crew over for a playdate.  Matt again mentioned that I could call him if I needed his help.

This morning, I completely forgot that I needed to be out the door at 9:05am to make any of this happen.  Matt also forgot and did not wake me up when he left for work at 7:45am.  (Sidenote:  our kids are old enough to get out of bed when they wake up, pour their own cereal, and play nicely.  This phase of life – where they are little enough to need me but not little enough to need me between 8pm and 8am each day – this is HEAVEN!  Matt likes to let me sleep so he sneaks out on the occasions that I’m still asleep).  At 8:50am, Rissa came in and said it was time to wake up.  She enticed me to open my eyes by saying I could see the beautiful outfit she picked out to wear to piano lessons.  She knows just how to sucker me!

We snuggled and giggled for a little while – I love when she wakes me up!  I’m always foggy and woozy at first.  Within 1-10 minutes, my mind will snap awake (yes, I’ve had my eyes open and have been talking for those 1-10 minutes, but I’m not actually awake yet) and I will realize that I’m not supposed to still be in bed.  Then I jump into action.  My family knows this and has learned not to trust my mumbled conversation, no matter how sensible I sound.  I can’t be trusted to actually be awake until I get that jolt of “What’s going on?  Okay, let’s get going!”  (Sidenote:  in college when I was an RA, there were students paid to stay awake all night to let people into the locked building.  If an incident happened, they called the RA on duty to come get involved.  There was this amazing girl at the front desk who KNEW that I could talk on the phone without actually waking up.  This was why I kept the phone on the opposite side of my dorm room – so I would have to stand up and go get it in order to answer.  She always chatted me up and I remember none of it, but inevitably, she would say, “THERE you are.  Hi, Jaime!  I need you to…”  She was so kind.)

So I’m finally awake and I check the time and it is 8:57am and WE HAVE TO BE IN THE VAN AT 9:05!!!  Augh!

I ask Zach and Rissa to get some clothes on Nathaniel (he loves to stay in his jammies until the last possible second before we leave, or just stay in them for the day) while I rushed through a shower.  I got out of the shower and heard Rissa saying, “Do you like this shirt or this shirt?  That will look nice!  Oh, but if you wear your crocodiles shirt, they can chomp Miss Joanne at piano lessons!  Okay, that’s a good choice… let’s do crocodiles.”  She is so sweet with her little brother.

We made it to Miss Joanne’s house a touch early, and I explained my plan to her – come back asap from my appointment, but perhaps the kids could stay a few minutes longer if I was late since it was in Mahomet?  She said they could, and I assured her that if I was too late, I’d let Matt know and he would come pick them up.

When I got back in the car after dropping off the twins, Nathaniel immediately announced, “I’m MAD!” because he really wanted to go to Miss Joanne’s house too!  He looks forward to his weekly session with my ipad and her children’s books.  I told him that I was sad that we couldn’t stay too, but I needed him to help me be brave at my appointment in case I needed a shot.  And I assured him that I still brought the ipad, so he could do that while I was at my appointment.  He perked right up and chatted me up on the drive to Mahomet.

My appointment went well, but I needed bloodwork done at the lab.  This has become a regular phenomenon… I can pretty much plan on getting a “shot” at each visit.  We headed to the lab’s waiting room, where Nathaniel charmed scads of elderly people who can’t resist a sweet little boy.  (Sidenote:  Nathaniel has met very few people who CAN resist him, so I suspect that extends beyond the older generation.  But they are especially likely to swoon over him because he is so delicious and they have enough wisdom and life experience to perceive that).

With only one employee in the lab, we waited forever.  10:30am arrived, piano lessons ended, and I called Miss Joanne.  She could keep the twins for 10-15 minutes, but not longer.  It would take me that long just to drive back, and I hadn’t even gotten into the lab yet!  I told her Matt would be there soon.  I called Matt and he agreed to go get the twins and bring them home.  He could wait with them until 11:35am at the latest, when he needed to leave to meet a friend for lunch.

Miss Jill arrived at 11am as scheduled.  Matt called me shortly after – apparently, she offered to stay with her two girls, her two neighbor girls who are spending this week at her house during the day, and my 3 children if he needed to leave.  I knew that she needed to be home at 1pm when she was helping out another friend and that she needed her lunch date with Chad!  (Sidenote:  we trade kids so that we can have lunch dates with our husbands.  Summer has been a whole lot of crazy on the scheduling end, but we’re still working it in because this idea is pure brilliance!  I love benefiting from my friends’ brilliant ideas, and Miss Jill hit this one out of the park when she suggested it).

I told Matt that I was next, so we would be on our way soon.  I still thought it was possible to get home by 11:35 so that he could leave and be on time for his lunch date with his friend.  “Go ahead and send Jill on her date to meet Chad.  Oh… and I’m hoping to make pancakes… is the griddle clean?”

At 11:35am, I called Matt from the road.  We were on our way, but wouldn’t be home until 11:50.  Could he ask Rachel (Jill’s neighbor girl, age 12 or 13, who was visiting us today along with her little sister) if she felt comfortable handling the other 6 children for 10-15 minutes?  Superstar that she is, Rachel said that was fine.  So Matt left and I was on my way and the kids watched an episode of Phineas and Ferb.  Rachel later reported to me that turning on the tv made babysitting so much EASIER and she would remember this trick. 🙂  (Sidenote:  Today, Rachel discovered one of the core principles of my parenting.  The tv is for MY benefit, not my children’s!  We use it when *I* need us to have it).

I was home in time to watch the second half of Phineas and Ferb and to make pancakes and to have the kids help me make exploding paint, which we then exploded in the driveway.  And despite the TOTAL CHAOS of the morning, everything was fine!  When Jill came back, the girls were disappointed because we had mixed our exploding paint, but not yet exploded it or painted with it.  (I’ll link you to Becky for the details… this was really fun!)  So Jill agreed to stay and apparently, her plans had moved to 1:30pm.  Whew!

As I was sitting in the waiting room at the lab, people were grumbling about how there was only one employee and this was taking forever and maybe she was new so she didn’t know what she was doing (What the heck?  She was working as quickly as possible – it isn’t her fault that there were so many of us who needed bloodwork today and that everyone else in her department was on vacation!  And maybe we can think about how she might miss her lunch trying to take care of all of us instead of whining, hmm???)  The main grumbler decided that his time was too valuable to waste and stomped out with his wife following meekly behind.  But I spent the time enjoying one-on-one time with my little man and thinking about community.

My morning only had 2 goals:  I needed to get my kids their piano lesson and I needed to attend my unreschedulable doctor’s appointment.

And it should have been doable… Miss Joanne was ready a few minutes early when I dropped off the kids, and my doctor works hard to be punctual so that he doesn’t waste his patients’ time with waiting in his office.  No problem.  And then the bloodwork threw everything off-kilter.  If I was on my own as a single mom, today would have looked very different.  I wouldn’t be able to have the twins in piano lessons because I couldn’t afford it.  I’d have 3 kids with me and be scrambling to find a way to have a doctor’s appointment with them.  I’d be at work during the summer instead of enjoying the simpler schedule of being a stay-at-home mom/work-at-home mom.  It is unlikely that I’d have the mental fortitude to hang out with Jill’s kids because I’d always be searching for opportunities to send my kids elsewhere!

But I’m not in that position.  I have Matt, who was willing to take time off of work to pick up our kids and then watched the 7 kids for half an hour and cleaned the griddle so I could make lunch.  I have Joanne, who had my kids for 20 minutes beyond their 1 hour lesson and was so kind about it.  I have Jill, who was willing to postpone her lunch date to cover for me and willing to take my kids last week so Matt and I could have a lunchdate and willing to stay a bit longer so we could finish our exploding paint.  I have Rachel, who was willing to manage the 6 tiny people at my house for 15 minutes while Matt, Jill, and I headed to and from our various appointments.  I have Nathaniel, who is easy-going and happy to sit and wait with me (as long as I bring my ipad!!!) and who also was a welcome relief to the other people in the waiting room.  I have three kids who let me sleep and who take care of one another AND our friends who come to visit.

I’m grateful for the help.  I often manage to pull off my life and perhaps people looking in think that I’m some kind of superstar who can totally handle the craziness.  (Never mind the fact that I only try Pinterest ideas that Becky finds and reports as successful because I can’t handle even going on Pinterest to look around.)  Nope.  I’m not a superstar and I’m not even managing my life.  I’m usually barely holding on.  I could crack any second, and I often do.  But I live in community and there are people (my husband, my friends, my children) who make life doable and even fun.  And I wonder… how many of us are barely holding on, no matter how well we look put together?  How many of us would drown without one another?  I suspect ALL of us.  Community is critical.  And we can’t just absorb it – we have to offer it back!

The Olson Tinies are headed elsewhere from this evening until tomorrow morning.  As in… we are not responsible for them!  I have LOTS of ideas for how to use this time:  blogging 6 months’ worth of catch up, projects on our house that require both parents/no children, personal projects that require focus and attention, our anniversary is next week and we could celebrate a few days early whilst the children are gone… LOTS of ideas.

You may be wondering, “Who on earth would take your children OVERNIGHT to give you this rare and glorious opportunity?”  That’s exactly the sort of question I am asking.  Below, in pictorial literary form, I shall reveal the answer.  And the awesomesauceness of the people who are doing this for us.  Love love love them!  Hint:  they also bought their very own plush Perry the Platypus to hide throughout the summer for our Phineas and Ferb “make every summer day count” adventure!