Category Archives: parenting (aint for sissies)

7 of 40 – Well, aren’t we adorable

Posted in Eucharisteo, family outings, joy found, laughter, my boy, my girl, my husband, parenting (aint for sissies) by

Day 7 Topic: Funnies. Annalise this time. I’ll be brief.

While we were having brunch at a restaurant, a couple walked by and smiled. The lady leaned over to Matt and whispered, “Just so you know, you have the most adorable children!”

As she walked away, Annalise asked what they said. Matt told her. Annalise asked if it was the man that said it. “No,” Matt replied, “just the lady said it.”

Her response: “Oh. He must not have seen us then!”

Atta girl. I like the confidence.

P.S. A couple of updates…

  1. I will be investing in a pair of long johns/long underwear for the boy. I still say tights work better – because of the feet and all. But all you guys that were concerned for my son, rest easy.
  2. I still have not made it on Annalise’s “Thanks Giving” leaves. Only 19 more chances. Not that I’m counting, or anything…

Summery Summary

Posted in joy found, laughter, my boy, my girl, my husband, parenting (aint for sissies), the relatives by

I am a list girl.

I make ’em. I categorize ’em. I stick to ’em. I stress when they aren’t getting crossed off quickly enough. When I defer from them and accomplish something else, I add it to the list just so I can cross it off. When I begin tasks without a list and later make one, I always, always include everything I’ve already done so I can remind myself I haven’t wasted my time.

And just between you and me, sometimes, when I need a victory – a bit of motivation and feeling of accomplishment for having actually gotten something done other than referee pre-school fights – I add this to my list: Make to-do list. It’s an automatic win.

…I just had a thought. I should add that to my lists, too. Referee pre-school fights. Another guaranteed success. And while I’m at it, I may as well include change a thousand diapers and feed bottomless pit children…

So at the start of this summer, when I usually make my long list of things to accomplish before school starts back up, I had a thought. I need to stop. The lists, while they just feel so good to cross off, seriously make me crazy when they sit, staring at me void of lines. A list of 27 items not crossed off is a list of 27 ways I’ve failed. 27 reasons to stress out – no, to panic – and start acting like a crazy woman because nothing else matters but those 27 stupid things. So, at the start of THIS summer, I decided to not make a list.

I decided that, then I made one anyway. It was 2 pages, 2 columns per page, typed in 12 point font. C’mon, what did you think? Addicts don’t often quit cold-turkey.

So yes, I made the list, but then I folded it up and set it aside. Available, but not in my face.

And then I made a new summer to do list:

  1. Live slowly
  2. Love deeply
  3. Laugh often.

Aaaand I stuck to it! Yay, ME!

Ok, so maybe I didn’t exactly live slowly, but I did attempt to live in the moment. I did live fully, enjoying the right now. And I loved and laughed. A lot.

What I didn’t do is write about it all. (Because I was living fully in the moment, remember?) So now I will attempt to summarize. Our 2012 summer and first few weeks of September:

  • July: Play hard. Beach, berry-picking, VBS, play-dates, walks, bike rides, Edaleen Dairy, slip ‘n’ slide, campfires at Grandma & Grandpa’s, and lots more.
  • August: Family. Long lost sisters! Cousins, cousins, and more cousins.
  • September: Back to routine. School/work, ballet & tap, Kids’ Bible Class, new (and also awesome) babysitter.

Our family’s personal highlights:

  • Annalise: Definitely not when she sprained her finger. Definitely moments spent playing with her long lost cousin, Ellia.
  • Jacob: Definitely not riding the dragon roller coaster at the fair. (They let him off – sobbing – after one lap.) His summer favorite is a tie between: 1) Getting a new dog. (Dog loves him. He loves her. Best friends for life… which (hers) may not be long if Matt has something to say about it.) and 2) Playing at the park with the new love of his life, Julianne. Too bad she’s about 17 years older than him.
  • Matt: Not sure he really had a summer. It was more like 2 full time jobs. But his highs were when we were around and he had time to be with us. Lows were when we spent a week in Nevada without him. 😦
  • Me: Hmmm… How do I choose? What’s not to love about spending 8 weeks not working and enjoying every moment with people I love? I know, lame. But seriously the truth.

Summer/September notables:

  1. Annalise went from a size 11 1/2 shoe to a size 13. And she is officially wearing clothing sizes that I remember wearing. Ack!
  2. Jacob didn’t learn his lesson and stuck a raisin waaayyyy up his nose. 24 hours of forced nose-blowing, pepper-induced sneezes, and flashlight shining up nostrils later, the long lost raising was recovered out of his crib.
  3. Matt shot 15 weddings and about 5,000 other shoots and spent every spare second of summer editing. If he wasn’t drinking all the coffee around here, I mighta thought he had fallen off the planet.
  4. I lost some weight before summer started. Good thing, because what once was lost now has been found. UGH. While I could blame my poor summer diet or seriously lacking summer exercise “routine,” I’d rather just blame my mom and sisters. Because really, I pretty much gain weight any time I am with them or when I stay at my mom’s. Clearly, it’s their fault.
  5. Izzy. She’s the new dog. a.k.a. “Dizzy.” She’s cute (part Yorkie), but I am embarrassed to admit that she is also part chihuahua. Just call me Paris Hilton. Yes, I do own doggie sweaters for her, but they were inherited with the mutt. A package deal. You can really start worrying if you see me carrying her in a bag. (She’d fit nicely in my current purse.) As my older sister says when she looks at her, “Yo quiero Taco Bell.”
  6. Minnie. She’s the new van. A mini-van. Love her. More than the new dog who may or may not have just peed on my couch.
  7. We *might* have alerted the staff in the polar bear section of the Point Defiance Zoo that there was a reindeer walking past our car in the parking lot. And the zoo staff *might* have gotten on the walkie-talkie to the keepers at the reindeer/bison exhibit to warn them of a potential escape. And that reindeer *might* have just turned out to be a regular old deer with velvety antlers. Who knew? (Not us, clearly.)
  8. While Jacob is great at spotting chewed gum on the ground in public locations (must be his closer proximity), only TWICE did he pick it up and chew it. But no worries… he put it back right where he found it both times.
  9. If you’re ever going to get pulled over for a driving a stolen vehicle, make sure you have several adults, 4 kids, and a dog with you, not to mention a trunk full of suitcases. You’ll look less suspicious. Oh, and make sure the vehicle isn’t actually stolen.
  10. Every minute of August was a notable. Lots of memory making with family. I am so grateful.

And this:

Thanks, Ann Voskamp. I feel better about #4 now.

To all, LOVES.

A rose by any other name

Posted in joy found, laughter, my boy, my girl, parenting (aint for sissies) by

Last week, Annalise had a great time at a beach-themed VBS with her friend Payton. (Thanks for the invite, Rachel.) On the last day, she brought home a purple beach bucket full of all her crafts from the week, her name written neatly on the outside of the bucket in gel paint. She was quite proud.

Except she has apparently inherited some OCD/perfectionist qualities from, ahem, I have no idea where, because she was bugged by a slight smudge on the second letter “a” in her name, right along the stem of the letter. Now let me be clear when I say that whoever wrote her name – in gel paint, on a round bucket – did an amazing job. Perfect printing in a perfectly straight line on a curved surface, all done from a squeeze bottle. I was impressed at the obvious talent of one who most certainly was a fellow perfectionist.

But as flaws often do, the smudge on the a wore at my little 4-year-old idealist. First, she pointed it out to me. “Do you like my bucket, Mommy? There is just a little smudge right here though.” I told her I loved her bucket, and I didn’t even notice the smudge. But now that she pointed it out, I liked it. It gave the bucket character. (I’ve had practice with this sort of thing, you know. I may have had to use that line for myself once or twice before.)

Then she announced – more to herself than anyone – that the smudge was “no big deal” and did her very best to ignore it. But I could see as she played with her perfect purple bucket with her almost-perfect name, it was still bothering her. She’d stop every once in a while to rub the smudge, pinch it, trying to squish away the imperfection.

Finally, she had enough. “Mom, I don’t like that smudge. I’m taking it off!” Before I could stop her, she had the corner of the letter a and promptly ripped that smudge – and entire stem of the a – right off her bucket… Leaving a perfect letter c behind.

Now as any perfectionist knows, a misspelling is much much worse than a minor smudge.

She gasped. “OH NO! Now I have a c instead of an a!” Panic on her face, she stared at the torn letter. “A-N-N-C-L-I-S-E! Mom, what’s my name now????”

I didn’t hesitate. “Ank-leese,” I said matter-of-factly.

Another gasp. “But I don’t like the name Ank-leese! It’s not even pretty!”

“I don’t think it’s so bad,” I responded. “Here. Let me take a picture of you with your new name, Ank-leese.”

“Well, I’m not smiling if you do. Ank-leese is not a happy name.”

I took the picture anyway, laughing the entire time. “Say ‘cheese‘ Ank-leese!”a

It’s very clear to me now why Jacob gets such a kick out of tormenting his sister. She just makes it so fun.

“MOMMY! It’s NOT FUNNY. How would you like it if your name was Hol-key?”

Hol-key? This girl is too much. I laughed harder. “That wouldn’t be so bad, Ank-leese. I don’t think I’d mind.” Still laughing.

“Well, I’m gonna start calling you that! Stop laughing, Hol-key!”

“That’s mom-key to you, Ank-leese.”

Apparently sarcasm and teasing don’t go well with a perfectionist’s frustration. Poor girl. So I told her that no matter what her name is, I will always love her the same. Annalise by any other name… even if that name is Ank-leese. Either way, she is mine and she is God’s and she is perfect to me.

We talked a bit about the bucket, and how she let a little thing bother her, and by trying to make it perfect, she only made it worse. That it is sometimes really hard, but that we have to be okay when something isn’t exactly how we want it, or isn’t what we think is “just perfect.”

And since she sometimes struggles with negativity, we talked about how we need to be thankful for our many blessings, and focus on the so many good things and not focus so much on what we think are bad things. 

Then I asked her about the story they learned in VBS that day. Ank-leese told me they heard the story about Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. We talked about how Jesus was perfect, fully God and fully man, that he could have come as a rich king, or however he wanted, but that he came into a poor family as a baby. I said how amazing it was that he, God, would do that, that he would wash the feet of the disciples. “Do you know what that means, Annalise?”

She thought about it, scrunched up her face and responded. “Yeah. It means he had some really dirty water.”

Lesson over.

“It is God who arms me with strength and makes my way perfect.” ~ Psalm 18:32

Oh, and I almost forgot… Jacob maybe learned his lesson about eating his boogers. No more floss needed. Yesterday he came to me and said, “Mommy, I picked my nose. But do not woo-wee. I did not eat it. I put it wight back in my nose.” Aaaand onto a new lesson…