Dear Friend,
It was so good to meet with you early this morning. I have missed our pre-dawn meetings through out the cold January and February months. I didn't know until this morning just how good you are to me. Meeting up with you helps me in so many ways and I know that I take you for granted, I will try to do better. You are the ultimate confidant under the blanket of stars and moon, you listen closely to my thoughts and even help me to keep my perspective. I love that you are as moody and temperamental as I, maybe this is why we get along so well. I am never quite sure, when we meet, what exactly I am in store for. You have your good days and bad days too. You are so good at pulling out the knot in my stomach and replacing that with healthier things. So here's to you my friend, Running, may we meet again soon!
So that was pretty dorky, that's ok. If you don't run then I bet you thought that was super duper-dorky! (kinda like saying "super duper") I got up this morning to run, I haven't done that in so long and I was thinking as I was running, how much I love this. By this I mean the kind of run when your legs feel strong and you can actually feel the ball of stress that sits in my stomach unwind and just leave. Where the only reason you quit is because you have to get ready for work. It's that type of run that keeps you running, because due to no tangible reason, your next run is hard, slow, and painful. You live for the "good run"
Friday, February 29, 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
How do you decide...
I want to hear from you! Now I am aware that I could open myself up to a serious tongue lashing from some of you and that's ok. I have the POWER of the delete button! OH THE POWER! (Insert evil laughter drop)
How do you decide when to let something just drop, or when to go ahead and fight a battle. I can't go into specifics out on the internet, but this is something I am dealing with at the moment and really need to make a final decision soon.
I certainly know that I can't really trust myself because my competitive self has issues with control and as we all know WINNING! I don't trust myself to decide one or the other, because in moving forward I fear it's just feeding that pride/need to win. However letting things drop leaves me feeling frustrated and run over and not being an agent of change in how things are done.
How do I decided which road to go down?
How do you decide?
Insert Big Sigh: Life was easier when it was just me, my home, my family and that's all I had to deal with...
That section on my report card: "doesn't play well with others" I need to check with my mom and see how often that got checked off!!
Update: I stewed about it for a couple days, realized stewing is not fun and takes WAY more energy than I have, so I dealt with it and moved on...
How do you decide when to let something just drop, or when to go ahead and fight a battle. I can't go into specifics out on the internet, but this is something I am dealing with at the moment and really need to make a final decision soon.
I certainly know that I can't really trust myself because my competitive self has issues with control and as we all know WINNING! I don't trust myself to decide one or the other, because in moving forward I fear it's just feeding that pride/need to win. However letting things drop leaves me feeling frustrated and run over and not being an agent of change in how things are done.
How do I decided which road to go down?
How do you decide?
Insert Big Sigh: Life was easier when it was just me, my home, my family and that's all I had to deal with...
That section on my report card: "doesn't play well with others" I need to check with my mom and see how often that got checked off!!
Update: I stewed about it for a couple days, realized stewing is not fun and takes WAY more energy than I have, so I dealt with it and moved on...
Monday, February 18, 2008
Surrounded
As I drove home from church yesterday, I got very teary eyed. I couldn't really let out the good cry that was trapped in my throat, because the two kids with me just wouldn't understand how the tears were happy tears. It's interesting to me that you don't really experience the "happy tears" til you are older.
All I could think of was how grateful I was to be "surrounded" that morning. You see Jessica was baptized Sunday morning and as I stood in church I was just overwhelmed with all love that was surrounding those baptismal waters. Jessica was surrounded by her daddy's strong hands doing the baptism, so she had no fears. My sweet mom (teary-eyed) along with my dad, my sister and her family, my grandmother and great aunt. (How blessed Jessica is to have had her great-grandmother in attendance at such a milestone in her life.) Chris' sister, and mom and dad were there too. I was also so grateful as I looked out into the congregation and saw some family friends that become more and more dear to us with each passing day. They were there to support and surround Jessica with their love too! How blessed we are.
I am so excited for my girl as she begins her journey of faith and I know that God's love and grace surrounded her that morning and will continue to surround her forever.
New Blog, finally!!
I know how irritated I get when I go to people's blogs and see the same title for weeks on end. C'mon people, don't you know you are a little slice of diversion in my life, a little bit of entertainment for me! Fresh blogs needed!! I know that I am now very guilty of that exact same trespass! So sorry to those that click on my blog and shake their head and roll their eyes.
So I was thinking on Thursday as I was vacuuming my house before company arrived on Friday that I am actually having to learn to procrastinate! Isn't that weird. I kinda chuckled as I thought of how so many friends in my life (Laura, Cathy, mainly) would so enjoy this process of watching me learn to procrastinate. When I was a stay at home mom I always had the time to do things waaaaayyyy ahead of time. For example say one of the kids had a birthday party to attend on Saturday, well I can guarantee you that by Wednesday of that week the gift would have been bought, wrapped and sitting on the dining room table waiting to go. Well, with my return to work this year, I simply have had to start procratinating, because there is so much more to get done. I think I might have realized that if I wait til Friday to buy the gift, the world doesn't end, it's not late, and it all got done. I guess I am growing in my procrastination! Don't tell Chris, he won't approve!! :)
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Thoughts
I was forwarded this email by a friend and I thought it was worth posting. It's so nice when someone else writes something that perfectly grabs what you have been feeling. It saves you the trouble of trying to piece together the perfect adjectives and adverbs to communicate your heart and you can simply read, cry, nod and be glad you aren't alone!! I am having such a hard time these days "enjoying the moment" if you will. I feel like I spend my week at work, trying to get ready for the next week that I don't even get to enjoy the week I prepared for so hard last week! It's a vicious circle... It's worse with my family, I feel like I am constantly trying to stay one step ahead in the laundry, the house cleaning, the school projects, the errands etc that I don't enjoy the moment I am in now. If anyone has an answer for this that would be great, feel free to comment!!
FOR PARENTS by Anna Quindlen
All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to beafraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like.? Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves.
Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past. Everything in al l the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early childhood education, all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild ThingsAre, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories..
What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all.. Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay.
No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2. When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.
Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the, "Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame." The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, "What did you get wrong?". (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less. Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.
FOR PARENTS by Anna Quindlen
All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to beafraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like.? Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves.
Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past. Everything in al l the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early childhood education, all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild ThingsAre, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories..
What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all.. Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay.
No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2. When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.
Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the, "Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame." The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, "What did you get wrong?". (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less. Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.
Friday, February 1, 2008
8 years already, really!!??
Tomorrow (Feb. 2nd) will be my baby girl's 8th birthday. WOW. It has gone so fast. I feel like it was just yesterday that I was in the hospital holding that precious girl. My newborn experience with her was so different than it was with Joshua, not better, not worse, just different. I wouldn't trade any part of either one. I loved how much I was able to enjoy her from the start instead of freaking out at each little thing like you do with your first. I can still remember a moment in the hospital it was late at night and it was just me and her in the room (I sent Chris home to be with Joshua) I was in the bed and kinda had her laying by me and all of sudden she rolled her little head up towards me and looked directly at me and right then it happened, I fell head over heels in what I call "mama love" with that girl , she stole my heart. She's had my heart ever since.
Fast forward 8 years and here we are. She is the sweetest child. She is smart, oh so creative, and has a heart of gold. I have so many favorite things about her so I thought I would list a few:
The girl loves her family! I love how she can't stand it if one of us is missing. It just puts her all outta sorts.
She takes care of everyone.
She loves animals of all kinds.
She is a GREAT friend. If I were 8 I would want Jessica to be my friend. Loyal as can be.
She is a leader. She doesn't always see it yet, but if she is comfortable in her surroundings, watch out, she will run the show.
She is honest. I have never met a child that will tell on herself, but she does. I pray that never stops! :)
I love how one minute she can be playing dress-up and searching for her lipgloss and the next minute she is wrestling with her brother or playing army with the boys!
She loves to snuggle.
She is generous.
She is funny.
She is beautiful.
I love watching my children grow up. It's so interesting to see who they are and see their personality blossom. I am so blessed to have her for my daughter. I think tonight I will take a little extra time to snuggle with her on her last night as 7 year old and talk about how great it's gonna be to be eight.
Thanks for letting me gush about my little groundhog.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Mama said there'd be days like this...
What a Monday it was! Just felt like recounting it for the blogger world to join in my pain. So the day starts with me still being completely stuffy, sinus headache, can't taste my breakfast kinda stuffy. However I load up my little teacher rolling cart and decide I can make it through the day and there's so much to do. Looking back now, I realize that I should have turned around when I dropped my rolling teacher cart on my foot when pulling it out of the car, and drop my coffee cup too. Why O' Why didn't I heed the signs. Still determined I start my day. I tell the kiddos, I am not 100% so cut me a little slack, they do, all day! (I have the best students) Well about 30 minutes into our morning we have a visitor to our classroom. Any teachers out there? Then you are fully aware of what I am about to say. EVALUATION! Yep folks, in walks the principal, yellow legal pad in hand to do my 45 minute evaluation for the year. Not only can I hardly breathe through my nose, coughing and sneezing too, but I am also trying to introduce a new math concept this morning. Anytime you introduce something new, total confusion settles in for about one class period and then they start to see it. I thought long division would be the death of all of us, now it may be fractions. Ok so I just keep going and things continue to go south, couldn't pull up some websites that I researched over the weekend cause the school internet was down momentarily (right when i needed it!!) Then my document camera fails, I need more fraction bars to let them work "hands on" ugh! I always get evaluated when I am teaching math and I am pretty straight forward, direct instruction type math person. I don't have anything super cutesy to show off with. Well we survived that and the principal left, hopefully with a little sympathy for me, hey do I get points for coming to work at least!? By lunch time medicine is making me tired, yet not doing a thing for the stuffiness. Well I had a true Costanza moment from Seinfeld, I grabbed a pillow from my reading center and laid down behind my desk!!! I knew I had 30 minutes and that's all I wanted to do! (Hopefully you all remember the episode where George would nap under his desk and he set it up with pillows and snacks etc.) I make it through the rest of the school day only to stay and tutor an extra hour. I finished the day with a bang by leaving work and heading over to the Sachse Municipal Strip Center, you cannot call that place a building and handed over $167.00 to them for a speeding ticket I got last week.
Mama said there'd be days like this!!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
