Satisfaction, Like It or Not

I wore the boys out Saturday. Wore them out. It was one of those afternoons that scrapbooks itself involuntarily: the rosy-cheeked children splashing and giggling in sepialike snapshots. I bought them another baby pool, and I kid you not, I have never been so happy with a six dollar sale item. I sat in my lawn chair reading, reading! while they bounced around safely in two feet of water. Greg grilled burgers and hot dogs and we put his Sigma Chi mugs in the freezer for frosty root beers.

When it got too hot I actually crawled in the pool myself. It was really grassy, you know, after Toby and Charlie had climbed in and out all afternoon. I grabbed the strainer from the sandbox and lazily skimmed the water. It felt good to cool off, but also kind of lame sitting there in an inflatable pool spooning out debris.

“What are you doing?” Toby said.

“I’m just cleaning off the yucky grass.”

“Why is the grass yucky? It isn’t yucky on the ground.”

He didn’t have to be so rational about it. I don’t know why it’s so yucky. It’s so yucky because I would rather be floating on a raft in a big people pool with a nice vacuum thingy cleaning it for me.

I like to think I’m above the discontent raging through America like typhoid, but I’m not. I peer out of Eden, looking for that one thing that isn’t mine, completely missing the giant mountain of wonderful I’m already standing on.

My two little boys are fresh and sweaty with life, laughing wildly under the bright blue skies of summer. How on earth could this be any better?

Summer Blessings

I know I haven’t written on my blog since, oh I don’t know, the Bush years, but believe me, I’m just saving my Shalom here. Nothing makes mommy grouchier than interrupted concentration. Like the “preschool is out and we can now leech every last drop of your humanity all day” variety. It is really much easier to abandon any personal accomplishment and surrender myself to the cause.

Which brings me to why I’m writing this post. Well, first it’s my birthday and the hubs mercifully gave me my laptop and car keys in trade for the children (I love that man). Time to myself is just logistics, however, because I have a deeper motive. My “cause,” my inspiration, my muses, are blooming like fresh summer roses and I don’t want to forget a single moment.

See, I’m crying here. Even through these days of interminable sameness, there is a violent need to hold on. First, is the growing. Growing documented daily by Toby in astonished hand-to-forehead comparisons. “Everyone!” he shouted this morning outside The Snooty Pig. “I am taller than this bench!”

“You are!” I said tearfully, plopping equal parts joy and grief in my motherhood repository. The doorknob! The fire hydrant! Mommy’s bed! He checks them off like a to-do list of vertical ascent.

Charlie too is sprouting with rosy-cheeked zeal. Every day he compiles a new stream of babble into an articulate sentence. A sentence! Sometimes my expectations are so behind I almost miss it. His sparkling brown eyes flicker intensely as he repeats “Wha Poby Dooeen?” in a consecutive stream until I smack my hand to my temple and get it.

“What is Toby doing? Of course! Let’s go find out!” I take his dimpled little hand into mine and we yell “Poby! Poby, where are you?” until we hear Toby laughing behind the curtains.

Some afternoons I sit down during their rest with my good intentions, ready to clink out another piece of my cyber memoir. Charlie opens his door and hollers “hello?” down the hall infinity times. Toby bursts from his room for a mid-nap poop. I just shrug my shoulders and sigh. There is nothing lost in a house full of life, this house, with two warm babies tucked under my arms, leaning on my chest as I stroke their beautiful heads.

God is so good to me.

Who Bloody Nose?

My kids are prone to odd maladies that lack medical urgency, yet still astonish and disgust everyone in their vicinity.

Take barfing for example. To this day Toby is the only toddler I have ever seen be personally delivered to his parents in the middle of church service by a gagging, vomit-covered child-care volunteer. If there were a barf Olympics I would enter Toby and tearfully cheer from the bleachers as he projectiled further than anyone in history. "That's my boy!" I would say and then I would reminisce about long nights spent on the couch holding towels under his chin and how worthwhile it was now that he was on the podium singing our National Anthem.

Last week we were outside for all of thirty minutes, wherein the absolute first mosquito hatchlings of summer congregated on Toby's shins for a celebration feast. It wasn't like I didn't know to hose the boys off in deet before subjecting them to the insect Hades of our backyard, but I hadn't checked my entomological calendar for the precise mosquito life cycle. One moment I'm dreamily sipping my Chai latte in Spring's sheltering arms, the next I'm digging through our medicine cabinet for the *AfterBite* cream and *Benadryl* because Toby's legs are swelling to the size of Redwood trunks.

I know what you are thinking. Lots of kids are allergic to insect bites and blah blah blah, but I kid you not, none of them (except B.A.D.) ever produced such hideous, colossal boils as what sprouted from my son's innocent flesh. Boils with eco-systems and lunar phases and fast food franchises. Part of me was a little excited to share this anomaly via Internet photo, and for that I apologize. In my defense, if your own child were capable of a grotesque reaction you would find the urge to shock your FB friends irresistible too.

Today I added "bloody noses" to my long list of *WebMD* queries. While my adoration and gratefulness for *WebMD* runs deeper than most consider prudent, there are times when I cannot convey the appropriate severity. "Bloody noses" are what happen when your brother throws a wooden train across the room, or when you go skiing in Breckenridge, or when you pick. Searching "Sudden failure of entire vascular regions while sitting quietly in Children's Worship" did not produce any valuable results.

What can you do? After four years of research I have learned there is usually nothing to worry about, and that just about anything is a symptom of cancer.

Anything except emetephobia. That is just a perk of mothering two uniquely gifted individuals.

Paradigms: Sometimes They Won't Fit the Mold

Remember your first child? You know, the one who fell asleep in the shopping cart at Target during the Christmas rush? The one who jumped in bed before you got to "two?" The one who kissed you without your having to pretend cry? The one whose bibs went unstained under the threat of mashed yams? Remember him???

Just when you accepted either a) your chromosomal superiority or b) your (look out...) remarkable parenting skills, your second child springs from the womb yelling "no" and laughing while you try to snuggle his limp-bodied, kicking self into some semblance of the Willow Tree carving on the dresser.

"Oh, I'm sorry," you tell him, "I guess you didn't know that breaking all the glass votive holders was dangerous. That yelling 'Cookie!' the entire time we ate out (though you were, in fact, holding a cookie) was irritating. That shrieking 'Down! Down!' as I carried you from preschool every day was embarrassing. It should look like this: you kneeling beside my heart-shaped, featureless face while I tenderly stroke your wooden cheek. Yes, that's it! Isn't that what you meant to do?"

Then your second child locks eyes with you and smiles very dimply and peachy while reaching one toe into the street just a touch, just a little weensy bit. "Charlie!" you say, "No sir! Go to the naughty spot!" You wave your arms and squinch your eyebrows so the neighbors see you are not permissive or negligent or incompetent, though you yourself aren't really sure.

You scrutinize your care, your attentiveness, your goodness while he sits in time-out. You look at his tiny bean-of-a-self enduring this formality with the remorse of an artichoke. What am I doing wrong?

He grabs his wiggly feet and sings, "He ha da Whole worl in His han!" and "biddy biddy beebees, in his han!" until you realize the answer is nothing. What is flawed is the statue itself, because as moving as it seems, it isn't as delightful, as marvelous, as perfect as this stubborn, extraordinary soul.

God don't let me change him!

Separation Anxiety

"My red is coming out!!!!" Toby yells. His alarm is always disproportionate to the actual trauma, so I have no idea if its a hangnail or a severed arm when he summons my highly qualified medical self to come rescue him. I nonchalantly grab a napkin and take it to the living room where he and Greg have all 87 parts of a ceiling fan sprawled out on the floor. Toby is sobbing and flipping me the bird. Well, not the actual bird, but he is sobbing and pointing my way with his injured middle finger.

"Is it a paper cut?" I ask because I forgot my go-go-gadget magnifier for microbooboo locating. "Mo-o-o-omm-y-y" he opens his mouth into such a wide cry that his lips barely reconnect for the m's. "I think your gonna make it buddy," I say. Greg returns to his screwdriverish super-project while I rinse Toby's finger in the kitchen sink.

Our underconcern makes him anxious-- as if some day he will puncture an artery or catch on fire and his parents might keep on weed-eating or browning turkey meat while he bleeds to death on the kitchen tile.

This is the part of four that baffles me. At two, I knew I could scoop him up and hold him for just a skinned knee. It felt so right reassuring him, letting him cry it out however long he wanted. Now I waffle between coddling and indifference, searching for a proper balance that won't land him in therapy twenty years from now.

Even more perplexing is his simultaneous need for manhood. One minute he wants gauze wrapped around an indiscernible wound, and the next he is following his dad up the ladder with a real screwdriver in his fist. I furiously dig through his plastic tool set for a safer toy replica wondering who to blame for his inconsistency, him or me?!

What I want is to have him both ways. I want him to be tough, independent, capable and I also want him to need me. I let him go with a wary unclenching of hands, then give him whiplash yanking his little self right back. Independence requires something of both of us that still feels foreign. I know I should lead and encourage him, but that requires a hint of risk, of danger that I'm too afraid to allow. The nurturing part is so much easier.

I think this will be my battle always. Like in the book "Love You Forever" when the old mother crawls through her grown son's apartment window and rocks him while he sleeps. Everything about that page is disturbing and muddled. You want to yell through the watercolor "Cut the cord, lady!" But when you sit on the bed next to a pair of chubby, bare feet you can't very well cast blame. It'll take everything you have to keep your own feet from clambering up behind her.

Chaos Theory

I can't think. I can't think. I am doing a load of whites. I am making sandwiches. I am gluing decorations for the coffee social at church. No, actually, I am slathering Vick's Vapo-Rub under Charlie's snot-soaked t-shirt while peanut butter and scrapbook paper and dirty socks sputter through my cranial mess of smoldering, sparking wires.

I hate it when I get like this. When I have so many things to do, so many unrelated, taskly things, that I stumble around completely zombified, unable to finish even one of them.

Why do I need peanut butter? When I press my fingers to my temples I imagine my brain's secretary fumbling for the file amid a cluttered, coffee-smelling office. You are hideously inept I say as she stares back guiltily.

We don't have time to fight because Toby's shoes were mysteriously summoned to Jesus, again. I send Greg outside to dig in the outdoor trash bin. “We should just buy new," he mumbles.

"Sometimes it’s the principle!" I yell because more than anything I want to know how shoes can vanish inexplicably.

I step over Charlie who is now driving a train on the bedroom floor. "Charlie? Where are Toby's shoes?" I ask hopefully when I notice poop falling out the back of his diaper. For the love!!!

I whisk him to the bathroom for a strip and rinse, trying to decide exactly why I'm gagging. Is it his poop-smeared back or the rope of green snot sliding down his upper lip? I sacrifice a whole bar of soap to the cause as I scrub the offending orifices. Now bleaching the bath-tub is following peanut butter through my frontal lobe like a tourist asking for directions. Except that peanut butter answers in confused French and it's obvious that NO ONE KNOWS WHAT'S GOING ON IN THERE!

Are there mothers somewhere darning fluffy-toed socks while their good-smelling offspring sort the recycling and eat beets? Children in some dry, remote corner of Arizona who never have sinusitis or crusty eye goo? How did I end up here, raising shoeless, allergy-ridden vegetable-haters, searching for poo in my carpet?

God why is this ridiculous exercise in anarchy part of it all? Why am I LOSING MY MIND?

I finally get them to bed and it is quiet. Instead of reading, or watching Grey's Anatomy, here I am clinking out the whole dirty mess of it for posterity. God, is it this? This now, sitting down to capture the wild confusion of our day? I roll each moment in my palm like a precious stone and it doesn’t seem exasperating anymore. It reminds me of how much I love this life, these children of mine, for whom I give all of my sanity. For whom it is an honor.

Four

Its your birthday! Though I'm certain you remembered because I woke up to your giggling face two inches from my nose. "Am I four?" you asked. Little, little you with your hands clasped in expectation, and your stuffed Dalmatian, Samson, drooping over the crook of your arm.

Little four-year-old you with a furious brain casting its nets in every direction, catching and sorting the new of it all. "I am having a baby," you explain, "All you do is eat a people and then it pops out your tummy." Little you. Little practical, sensible you.

Practical like this: When you step on the new scale daddy bought for our bathroom. "I think I will measure my feet," you say. Measure your feet. Of course.

Little you, full of anguish, because we are all out of oatmeal cookies. Little you, exploding with glee because the diggers are moving the dirt on the lot down the street.

I am so proud of how you've grown. But when you stand in your big four-year-old bones and words burst from your mouth like bubbling candy, I just can't believe it. I still see the itty-bitty you that cried if I walked in the bathroom to pee.

Four years of you. The best four years of my life. Happy Birthday, little man.

Landfills

All I want to do is clean the [stupid] floors because they are covered with torn up bits of toilet paper [and dog hair] that two chubby hands are pushing around with a yellow bulldozer.

"Toby, please clean up this mess!"

Toby is outraged. "It is NOT a mess, it is a landfill!" but I do not see the justification his tone implies, because Charlie has trash bits stuck to his upper-lip snot and that is where I DRAW THE LINE!

"I will not throw the trash away [while you are looking]. I will put it in the special place [where I keep the preschool projects made with popcorn kernels]," I say, but he isn't listening anymore because Charlie is pushing the bulldozer out of the living room and throwing a taunting giggle over his shoulder.

Sometimes I wonder what it is like for Greg at work every day doing his job without anyone trying to stop him. I imagine him sitting at a quiet desk checking off items on his "to -do" list with a sharpie. How quaintly productive.

I have to squeeze all the cleaning into one episode of Oswald or I might as well not bother.

I might as well not bother anyway because I have two little boys and this is just life.

A dirty, snotty, cluttered life.

But a good one.

Booger-Nose and Poopy-Pants

Booger-nose is running through the house with a yellow yard stick, swinging it around like he is a ninja. Oh wait... no, he's a railroad crossing and a train is coming. He grasps the yard stick end with both hands and down it goes, "ding, ding, ding". It is just so exciting that I must watch it happen or else he appears exactly one centimeter from my eyeballs to make sure I see him. "I do see you," I say, but I would rather not have this exact vantage point because the booger in your left nostril is very close to my face.

Poopy-pants waddles his stinky bottom our way, coughing up a misguided sip of water from the Ozarka bottle he found under the couch. "Oh Poopy-pants are you Okay?" I say as I gently pat his belly. He looks happy to be belly-patted and encores with an experimental "cuh, cuh" just to see if I do it again. I do.

Suddenly, the yard stick whirls through the air searching for its next identity. It nicks a speck of paint off the wall and almost takes out poopy-pants altogether. Booger-nose does not notice though his eyes faithfully follow the whirring streak of yellow as if it might spring to life any second.

Poopy-pants is bored with coughing and is now perfecting his sneeze. "Ah, ah, ah, ah too!" He emphasizes the punchline so well that his whole body follows his nose straight into the carpet. He rolls over wondering where he is. "Yayyyyy!" I say to Poopy-pants and he smiles a big gap-toothed grin.

Booger-nose stops because he needs "a little bit of love". He crawls into my lap for a hug. Poopy-pants can't be left out and he waddles in too. I squeeze their snotty, stinky, little boy bodies.

Booger-nose and Poopy-pants, I couldn't be happier.

A Weekend With the Crankertons

"Stop looking at me Charlie. Stop looking at me Charlie. Mommy make Charlie stop looking at meeeeeee."

"If you don't look at him, he won't look at you," I say as I flip down the visor mirror and make sure it is really me talking and not my mother.

"Say 'Stop it!' to Charlie. Why is he looking at me when I'm not looking at him?"

I turn up the volume on the stereo so the rhythmic "aha's" of Voulez Vous drown out the one-sided brawl from the backseat. Charlie's eyes are so dead-locked on Toby I wonder if he secretly understands Toby's complaint and is internally laughing.

"Charlie, stop looking at Toby," I say, just in case.

Before I have a chance to stop it -- and I would have given my right eye -- the final track of my ABBA 1 CD fades away and the changer dutifully ushers in the next disc. Back, Back, Back I push but it is too late and Boz the big green bear repeats "Here we..., Here we..., Here we..." until I finally give up and let him spit out the full "Here we go!" in his irritating jubilation. Toby forgets Charlie's death stare to cheer for Boz, the big fat Christian version of Barney and for a moment I think I might prefer the whining.

Soon it doesn't matter because I can think of nothing but the stomach bug floating through pre-school again and if I remembered to put hand sanitizer on the boys before they ate the animal crackers in my friend Jenn's office. I can almost hear the triumph of the crittery virus making its way into the innards of my unsuspecting children because, I know I didn't remember and now we will all be barfing up a lung come tomorrow. And that makes me cranky.

But not as cranky as Charlie was later in the driveway, protesting the wretchedness of humanity because the front wheels of his riding fire truck were stuck in the grass. He waddled around me a few times with a squinched-up, moaning face before depositing his 2 foot self head first into the yard.

What is everybody's problem?

I could understand this better if we lived in a parched Ethiopian desert and relied on locust wings and cactus dew for survival, but we have no legitimate complaints. The hovering, nurturing parenting style I credit for their neatly trimmed nails and taste for yogurt smoothies is also responsible for the Bratty Crankertons that we have all become.

When it is time for bed, I briskly yank the oversized t-shirt over Toby's head. "Mommy, can we sleep in the living room again? I like sleeping in there with you."

We had a couch camp out weeks ago when he had the flu. What made him recall a night of puking into bath towels as a chummy slumber party I can't fathom. I squish his chubby cheeks in my hands and smooch him. "Toby, we sure did have fun, didn't we?"

And isn't that the beauty of family? Looking back on all these times, good or bad, and remembering only that you were loved.

Couch Throwing

Its the kind of evening when the bits of nothing I did all day lump themselves together into one large energy-sucking wad and sit comfortably on my shoulders while I survey the toy explosion that is my living room floor.

I could get up and sort the tractors and race cars and trains into their beautifully irrelevant bins, but then the world's youngest defense attorney would follow me around to justify the mess in his customary whine and I am too tired to litigate. No, I feel more like collapsing to the floor on my back and tickling the boys as they run by to hopefully avoid an actual game of chase.

This part of our evening, between dinner and bed, I sometimes watch the clock like an employee waiting for the end of my shift. Greg is equally unmotivated and flips between ESPN and ESPN 2 to catch a glimpse of what? I don't know, maybe the famously chiseled super-athlete he would have rather been at forty. The crowd-cheering game highlights and chatty commentary makes it harder to ignore the vehicular debris and the hint of dog smell on our carpet.

Only half an hour more... I think at seven-thirty as if then I will be putting on my sexy jeans and some high heels for martinis with the girls instead of staying in this same position, in this same t-shirt recycled from yesterday, staring blankly at the football stats whizzing below the SportsCenter news desk.

Its not that I mind being with my boys, me with a hyper-awareness that every day is a brief and finite luxury. Its just after replying cheerfully to the quantillionth snot emergency and rhetorical "Do you know...?", even they are tired of my smilingly present face.

These kind of evenings have a way of surprising me. Like when Greg, out-of-nowhere, grabs Toby and throws him on the couch like a giggly bag of sand. When Charlie's knee-high bean-of-a-self rushes toward his dad with arms lifted high, begging for his turn, its then that all of those nose wipes and time-outs have measured value and bring me satisfaction. Suddenly we are the world's happiest family, laughing hysterically as throw after throw, the pleasure of being together sails through the air on a small delighted face.

If tomorrow doesn't bring us a bowlful of sunshine at least we'll know that today, we didn't miss this.

I can think of no greater achievement.

Being A Man

Every little boy wants to know that he is strong, that he matters. Only a man can tell him. Thank you, thank you for loving my boys and not leaving them to wonder...

Boys and Girls

I didn't miss the finer points of Anatomy in eleventh grade. How could I have known that physiology is only the leafy display of a towering, deeply rooted tree? What I saw in the lab, casually dissecting a formaldehyde-soaked cat cadaver while smoothing the pleats on my cheerleading skirt, were just symbols that shroud a deeper truth.

Its me and him. And we are the same because he is three and I carried him not long ago, not long ago at all. I knew there would be a day that he suddenly noticed, anatomically speaking. A moment when I shrugged my shoulders and admitted with a lump in my throat that he'd probably known for awhile. I imagined an awkwardly encoded conversation regarding the important "parts". He would be old, you know, years from now when I am ready to let him go. Years from now. Instead, I realized that boys and girls are different long before "parts" have any relevance and letting him go is happening now, in a slow frenzy that I will never be ready for.

Since school started, there has been Ava. She captivated him with her brown-eyed beauty. He mentions her freely while talking about storybook time or music class. His teacher stopped me the other day to tell me all about their chase game on the playground (which I found positively un-funny).

I decided to ask him about her. Tell me about Ava, I said. His eyes gleamed and it hurt me a little. He told me about sitting beside her at chapel, and asking her to be his friend. He told me about the toys they play with in class and what they make in art. He narrated conversations and pointed out the matching color of her hair in a picture book nearby. He told me about the rescuers. The game where Ava is in trouble and he saves her day. Mommy I save Ava, he said, like I am Fireman Sam.

His hands are chubby and he hasn't grown into his wide sparkling eyes, but he already feels the desire of a man's heart to be the hero. You are not a man! I want to say. You are my little boy! That is how I want it to stay. Let's go play trains, because I want you to need me forever. Years from now, we will talk about grown-up things and then you can go search for your princess and save her day.

Years from now.

Later we sit together in the big chair because it is storming outside and he is scared. "You are my favorite girl, mommy" he says with his head on my shoulder. I can smell his head smell. I kiss it slowly, and wonder how something can fill you with so much pleasure and pain at the same time.

Toby, what a man you will be.

(Years from now.)

Lunch... Interrupted

I ate a ham and cheese panini in a little cafe on the edge of Southlake Town Center. I had already been to the doctor that morning and told it was not time, see you next week. My friend Jerri sat across from me making idle conversation while I pouted about my inhumane state of being. Every so often we paused so I could breathe in and out and adjust to the intermittent cramping in my belly, false labor rallying to mock my ginormous, bloated, blob of a self. When we finished, Jerri looked at me curiously before parting with an intuitive suggestion: go home and rest. I waved off this gross overreaction like any deliriously pregnant idiot.

Though the cafe was around the corner from my hospital, I drove the fifteen miles back home with Toby in the backseat. I called a couple of friends to nonchalantly ask labor questions -- but not because I thought I was in labor or anything. That would be really melodramatic. What I had was just a tightening around my middle every so often.

I was getting Toby down for nap when I suddenly doubled over in pain. It only lasted a few seconds, but it was very intense. I decided to call the doctor and Greg, just to be on the safe side. Greg flew home... the doctor, however, told me to call him in the morning if I still felt like something was happening. I sent Greg back to work and called my pregnant friend Jennifer to come over and sit with me. Greg protested, but I told him how labor lasts forever and I was not actually having it anyway. It was false labor.

Jennifer and I timed my contractions for almost two hours. They were getting worse, especially since it wasn't the real thing. We called the doctor back -- just to check in. He said it was no big deal until the contractions were six minutes apart for a complete hour. We cheerfully kept tabs on the clock and gabbed about how huge we were and how we would always remember the day we sat around my house keeping our cool when most pregnant women would have rushed off to the ER like dorks only to be sent right back home. Hahaha.

I went ahead and called my mom and dad, you know, just to let them know I was not about to have a baby, just feeling some terrifically strong Braxton-Hicks. In fact, now that I have them on the phone I think I am going to let them talk to Jennifer for a few minutes... I am suddenly unable to stand. Actually, I can't even breathe without crying a little bit... is this typical of false labor?

It was at that point that Jennifer took over, God love her. She pulled a groggy Toby from his bed and whisked him next door to my friend Keri's house along with two diapers and an indefinite pick up time. She and Keri hoisted me into Jennifer's mini-van, which I assure you was no small feat. Jennifer talked to me, called Greg, drove, and timed contractions. I cried. I thought, what kind of person cries through Braxton-Hicks? How would I ever survive the real thing???

We stopped at the church where Jennifer intended to drop me off to my husband. Unfortunately, I could not get out of the van. Greg had to hop in the driver's seat with me and Jennifer followed in his car. It was 3:30.

At 3:50 we pulled into the hospital parking lot. Greg had been on the phone with the L and D floor to explain our situation and they had a nurse waiting for us in the circle drive. I was white knuckling the seat cushion and moaning like a wounded lion. As we pulled up, an innocent bystander inadvertently walked in front of the mini-van. I remember yelling out the window in my best Linda Blair for her to "MOVE"!!! Greg, however, recalls it with a bit more @$#%#& thrown in. You can pick.

My nurse, Suzy, whisked me up to a room in a wheelchair. She gave me a gown to put on which I unfortunately was never able to do. I got as far as undressing before a surge of pain prevented anything more. Suzy rushed in and helped me to the bed. I begged for my epidural. I screamed. I crawled around on the white sheets pleading for someone to cut the baby from my abdomen and put an end to this ridiculous formality. Somewhere in my delirium, a pack of medical professionals arrived to not save my day. Equipment was rushed into the room and this and that person were paged STAT.

My doctor explained that he could break my water and speed things along, but an epidural would never have time to work. I explained that it would work even if I had to gouge the needle into the center of my own brain. As if staged for a TV movie, my water broke with a loud pop. I started bawling, crouched on the hospital bed that looked like the background set for a horror movie. I guess he had pity on me and an anesthesiologist was allowed to give the epidural a try. She was wonderfully quick -- but not quick enough. At 4:20 pm, approximately one nanosecond after my epidural went in, Michael Charles was caught by the doctor with the gown I never had the joy of donning.

It was a miracle. The first baby to ever be born to a woman in false labor. Everyone walked around me like I was the Blessed Mother. Okay, not really. Everyone seemed pretty put out with me and my capacity for denial. Greg was utterly traumatized after witnessing a birth void of pain relief and dignity. My mother was somewhere between Oklahoma City and Ardmore missing the whole thing. Jennifer was relieved to not be scrubbing placenta out of her mini-van floor mats. I was the only one feeling quite dandy. I spared myself the anxiety of impending labor and even better... I never missed single meal. By 5:00 I was in a private room munching on a turkey sandwich.

Charlie, some day when you are old enough to read this without dying of embarrassment or gagging, I hope you know that you were worth every minute. I love you.

Tiredness

I have it lately. Maybe its my kids. Maybe its an immunization to caffeine from my increasing daily intake.

Maybe its five o' clock runs catching me in the middle of the day as I lay next to Toby looking at books before nap. I cheerfully narrate The Little Engine That Could, squeaking or bellowing each character's voice like good moms do. Then somehow, on our way up the mountain with all of the toys and cookies for the children of the village, Little Engine begins to chant I think I can I think I can until the words melt into a breathy slur.

This afternoon I made it through This Train, Freight Trains, and The Bear Detectives before my head lolled over onto Toby's choo-choo pillowcase muttering about "resting eyes". When Greg came home unannounced I felt like my hand was guiltily digging in the candy jar instead of rescuing the living room from Fisher-Price besiegement.

Staying home with my kids is the best thing I have ever done. But with all the tenderness and satisfaction I feel every time my lips rest on their puffy little cheeks, there is sometimes a haze of monotony draping its weary veil over me and threatening to suck it all back out. Everything I accomplish is methodically undone before I even acknowledge the success.

I fixed the boys lunch today. We stepped on the exasperatingly dull hamster wheel of meal selection. Our wheel only divides into thirds due to the most unadventurous palate God ever knitted in a mother's womb.

It is always the same. Always.

Should we have sandwiches? Nuggets? Fish Sticks? Fish sticks you say?... Great choice. I bake them. I blow on them. I plunk them in the big compartment of the Veggie Tales plate. I squish a sludgy dollop of ketchup into the smaller one. I chop up the tiniest piece of fruit and place it hopefully over Larry's green cucumber nose. Then I cut two fish sticks into a dozen and a half pieces for Charlie's high chair tray.

Today I offered Toby a trip to our prize box for eating the shard of peach.

He said, " I wanna go to the pwize box."
I said, "Eat your peach."
He said, "No."
I said, "Then no prize box."
He said "I wanna go to the pwize box."
I said, "Eat your peach."
He said, "I was talking to my chair." Then he walked around the kitchen saying "I want to go the pwize box" over and over to the patio door, the dog, the fridge.

He did not, however, eat the peach.

I thought about burying my head in the couch pillows. It is peaceful in there if you can ignore the grains of crunched up cheerio. I could catch a few winks while the boys whine and tug at my legs, and laundry goes sour in the washing machine, and chaos blows over our house in a dizzy wind.

I picked up the tiny shard of peach from Toby's abandoned plate and offered it to Charlie. He let me lay it right on his ever-loving tongue. Did he gag? Did he shudder? Did he grab his throat and drop to the floor? No, he did not. He flashed me a wide, toothless grin.

I made another latte.

Summer Nights

I don't even clean up the supper dishes after we eat. One minute, our table is alive with the sounds of our voices: me cajoling Toby to lick a chunk of banana, Toby driving a tractor around his plate obliviously, Greg recounting his day or dreaming aloud about a car he wants to buy, and Charlie interjecting nonsensical babble with hearty ten-month-old conviction. The next minute, our spoons sit dejectedly in their bowls on a lonely puddle of taco soup while we dash outside to enjoy the only survivable portion of a Texas summer day.

I use "survivable" loosely due to the ravenous mosquito squadrons hunting and feasting on the blood of my innocent children. Since one bite has Toby swelling up like a bloated puffer fish it can be a real obstacle. Don't go all crazy commenting on Skin-So-Soft or Spring Fresh Off. Here in Texas, our mosquitoes are like super-powered biologically mutated versions of any insect deterred by a sweet-smelling non-carcinogen. We practically hose our kids off with deet before we send them out in the elements. (Okay not really so please don't actually do this.)

What I love about our summer nights are the subtleties, the inconsequential images that burn into my brain's very matter. Toby riding his trike barefoot down our sidewalk with his sweaty buzz-cut melon head flashing me a dimpled smile. Charlie crawling around the grass on only his hands and feet like a baby Spiderman. The neighborhood kids catching toads and insects while dripping Popsicle juice down the front of their t-shirts. These are the times when I know I am blessed. I sit next to Greg in a cheap folding chair and chat about life and hopes and love while we watch it all unfold under our noses.

When it is too dark to see, we gather up all the chairs, and toys, and Popsicle sticks and herd everyone into the house for a bath. We're sticky and red-cheeked, but peaceful.

If you told me at twenty-one the perfect evening started with a hasty soup dinner and ended in the tub scrubbing grass-stained toes I would have contested you vehemently.

But I what did I know?

My Photo Albums

They are a half-hearted nod to satisfy the unspoken mandate of childhood:

"Thou shalt preserve every memory no matter how insignificant on a four by six square and if you really love your kids in an expensively adorned the heavier the better album."

I have friends with gargantuan books that took hours upon hours of cutting, designing, and gluing to achieve. Special glue, special designs, and special scissors. When all is said and done, the book ends up being about 95% decor from Hobby Lobby and 5% actual photos.

Knowing my distaste for wasted space, I started smaller. Albums with the slidey-inny picture holders and a margin for writing details. If you set the bar low, it is easier to reach, ya know? I trudged through Toby's first year and managed to organize enough photos to account for every season and formally document the most important "firsts". Ughhh. Charlie on the other hand, is approaching his first birthday and the last pictures I officially preserved for him are of his hospital homecoming -- and my mother-in-law had to send them to me because I didn't take any myself. Double ughhh.

Today I had an epiphany. A mother who spends hours cutting and gluing and baubling up an album is probably doing it because it is an expression of herself that she enjoys sharing with her child. Her creativity and thought are scattered all over the book among the ornate papers and specially chosen snapshots. She is leaving a legacy to them that says you were known and you were loved.

I was thinking about a few of my friends that are further down the road, and the legacy they are leaving their children. The stuff that isn't forced out of them to check the box of societal expectation.

My Jen, and her ever-working mind that answers the cool questions to which most moms slap a stock response. Her children know why spider webs have different patterns and what is inside a robin's egg. They traipse around the neighborhood independently, "sciencing" whatever odd plant or insect they discover.

Jerri and her femininity, always knowing just the kind of things to plant in her daughters' hearts to show them they are lovely.

Keri, whose garage is home to more soccer balls than Brazil, spends her summer evenings kicking in the yard with her three kids and husband, laughing and smearing grass stains on joyfully dirty clothes.

Sundie, whose kids are living life with passionate adventure, climbing to the highest branches in the tree, the places most moms would forbid. Her children will never doubt their strength or her trust in them.

For me, I love thinking about my boys. I love reliving our experiences together in my mind and turning them over like precious stones. I love their presence, their smell, their cheeks, their toes.

Toby and Charlie, I know a picture is worth a thousand words, but I hope you will understand why a thousand words is what I am leaving you. This is my legacy, a piece of my soul, and it is crafted with all of the care and thought that I have.

Toby Gets Religion

The flu. A very long, feverful, snot-tacular, exhaustingly monotonous crater in our late winter bliss. It is the malefactor I now blame for my son's relentless presence beside me in Sunday morning service.

It started out as sober precaution. A desire to not relive eight straight days of isolation and nauseating amounts of Thomas and Friends. Just a temporary quarantine from church childcare, where influenza lives a life of germy luxury.

When spring arrived, I happily marched my boys back to the children's check-in area, ready to enjoy service by myself. I passed Charlie over the counter without incident. Toby, however, staged a frantic coup by disintegrating into a noisy puddle of anguish on the lobby floor. I should have scooped up the blubbering mess of him and poured it into the three year old room where it belonged. Instead, I offered him a glazed donut and implored a promise to whisper during the talking parts.

So, here I am in late May walking into the auditorium with my perpetual "pew" buddy flopping along behind me with his mouth crusted up from donut glaze.

I stand him up on a chair slightly behind me, our usual routine, and I join in the chorus of "God of Heaven Come Down" with everyone else. I glance back every now and then to make sure he is not engaging anyone behind us with silly faces or peek-abo like he has in the past. He flashes me an angelic grin as if he knows my motive.

When the communion tray goes by I let him help pass it along, but not before he spends the better part of a minute selecting the biggest cracker square for himself. Then I try to appear casual while my non-baptized, non-prayerful, heathen son defiles the very blood of Christ by jauntily drinking a cup of juice in three relishingly slow sips as if this were nothing more than a refreshment break. (For those of you who were sitting two rows back and throwing me scorn arrows from your offended, legalistic eyeballs just remember that I know it's inappropriate, but I am living by grace so that you can peacefully direct your thoughts to the Savior of the World without a soundtrack from my three year old son whom Jesus LOVES.)

Once communion is over Toby and I sit together, my arm around him, his legs straight out in front and only long enough for his two green flip-flops to hang over the seat edge on his chubby, wiggly feet. Toby do you know that we eat those crackers and drink that juice to think about Jesus? It's hard to hear over the loud music, but he looks at me when I talk and I hope in a tiny way he begins to see a bigger picture of why we come here every Sunday morning.

The band launches into "Nothing but the Blood" in a groovy remix that has everyone in the room on their feet and singing loudly. I sway and bounce to the catchy beat. Suddenly, my son, who has no understanding of abstract concepts like sin or sacrifice or redemption, raises one hand in the air, palm open in a gesture of worship, as if this were the most natural thing in the world to do. I try not to react because I want him to have this moment for himself, but I just can't stop all the heaven inside me from bursting open in colorfully radiant pleasure.

I know he is only a little boy, but someday, he may see things in his heart that he wishes weren't there. He may find himself lonely and afraid. I hope when that day comes, he'll know just what to do.

Another Year Goes By

Toby's second year of preschool is over. It felt odd because, wasn't it just yesterday that he finished his first year? Charlie was still a little bean in my stomach making me nauseous and swollen and grouchy while I feigned excitement over the rented water slide that Toby WOULD NOT go down.

This year was the same, except Charlie was strapped into a baby carrier with a bottle propped in his mouth and Toby didn't require a swim diaper under his suit anymore.

A suit, I might add that was wholly unnecessary since Toby melts if any water touches his clothes or head. A sweet girl from his class splashed him playfully with a cup full so he serenaded the 50 foot periphery with heaving sobs complete with those little pauses of breath-holding as if we are all going to jump out of our lawn chairs and rescue his poor little wet self. Oh Toby, you got wet?? With that highly corrosive, painfully burning irritant that God covered 80% of the earth's surface with? Let me call a HazMat team to come and save you. Or how about I WIPE you off with a TOWEL...

I wasn't in the cajoling mood, so we opted out of the scary dragon bounce house station and killed time in the empty sanctuary which is entirely more amusing to him anyway. Playing on the stage is a fundamental right for any church staff kid. He ran up the steps to the stage and back down and all around the instruments and baptistery and sound booth. It was so funny watching his small body compete with the enormity of the huge auditorium. Even though his second year of preschool has come to an end, he still looked sufficiently babyish when his legs pitter-pattered across the wooden set like Fred Flintstone.

Tonight I chased him around the living room to steal some kisses and my hands found a tummy that was not babyish at all. It was thick and solid like a bag of sand. I grabbed his leg and it too had sprouted a chunk of muscle.

I pinned him down on his back and tickled him. You are not mommy's baby anymore Toby I said too sadly. His eyes twinkled with a glimpse of his future self, wise and intuitive. A lil' bit I am still mommy.

Toby, I am happy that you are growing into a big boy and that you can jump off the couch and make your brother laugh and even eat an apple without barfing. But it makes me smile to know that in a small way, you will miss being my baby too.

Absurdity

Toby wakes up and cries because he doesn't feel like going pee pee in the potty right now he just wants to watch his train video in his pajamas and drink chocolate milk. Or maybe he wants to see what things he can hold in the mouth of the toy plastic pliers that he is waving around the bed like a villainous claw. Look mommy! James! They can hold James like this! And he grips James the red engine while making a squinchy, growly face. James falls loose and Toby cries again and I want to run out of the room to my bed and throw my covers over my face for the rest of the day.


But I don't. OK I say, you can stay in your pajamas, but I regret this when we take the pajamas off to pee pee and put them back on again in our usual slow way that makes my bones cringe in frustration and produces no real accomplishment for our day.


I need THAT mommy, get me THAT. He runs to his closet and points at his blue piggy bank on the top shelf. I clangily hand it to him before pulling Charlie from his room and plopping him in the bouncy seat with a bottle propped on a wad of fluffy blankets. Toby follows me closely, his horde of coins clanking with each step like the ghost of Christmas past dragging a trail of chains.


In my bathroom I try to get ready. I let him loll around on the floor while I blow dry my hair and he finds all the treasures a mom's bathroom proposes. An eyelash curler, a contact case lid, my wedding ring. Oops, you can't play with that, I say as he tries to stuff it into the slot of the piggy bank. Whyyyyy? He whines dolefully while playing with it anyway.


Don't you know that it is MOTHER'S DAY and Charlie's Baby Dedication Day and I just want to look NICE at church with my hair NOT in a ponytail for ONCE. And even though it may prevent anyone there from recognizing me altogether, I just don't care today, because it is MOTHER'S DAY and I want to enjoy living it, because I am your MOTHER.


He blinks at me with total incomprehension and tries to hold the contact case lid in the clamp of the eyelash curler. Charlie rallies and drops his bottle over the edge of the bouncy seat with a yelp of glee. I feel like I am somehow missing the magic of this day, and that probably all other mothers are lying in bed with a tray of pancakes festively served beside a long stem rose and steaming cup of coffee, opening construction paper cards with I Heart Mom scrawled in red crayon. Mothers whose husbands are not pastors and working on Sunday.


We make it unceremoniously to service and meet Greg just in time to march Charlie up on stage along with nine other babies for his important spiritual debut. We smile when they call his name and we kiss him and squeeze him and promise in front of the congregation to raise him to know the Lord. I look at his little bean of a body in my arms and hope that I really can do it. That my pouting over Mother's Day and my impatience with his brother and my just imperfectness will not be all he sees in me. I hope he sees something deeper: the thousand foot well that is my heart exploding with wild hope for him.


We sing together, our little family lined up in a row, and I feel a surge of peace when I realize I would never be enough. That even though I love my boys with an aching, relentless energy, I am NOT everything they need. And if I was lovelier and every note sung from my mouth was rich and pure like buttery syrup dripping from a spoon I still couldn't capture the beauty of God for them. And if I was stronger, and when Toby sat by me in church, I didn't guiltily let him fondle the communion crackers and sneak a juice cup just to keep him quiet, I still wouldn't convey the strength of God for them.


I am just their mother, someone to point the way not be the way.


Suddenly, I don't think myself capable of any more joy than I am bursting with today, singing "Beautiful One" loud and free in my own croaking boisterousness with my boys and Greg at my side on my Mother's Day. This morning, if I wrote about happiness it would have been pancakes and compliance, daintily ideal and sickly perfect. In this moment, happiness is feeble and weak and wonderfully satisfying.


God help me trust them to You, my most sacred treasures.