A Day in the Life

Last night I ate broccoli. Hence little man enjoyed broccoli milk later on. For a guy who has problems with indigestion anyway, I doomed myself with the first bite. Along comes 11pm, and with it, the first wake-up of a very long night. 11:30, 12:15, 1:30, 2:15, 3:30... and that was the last, because the little broccoli monster stayed awake. It's a good thing he's so cute.

So, yeah. My day began at 3:30am with screaming broccoli burps. Coffee is my best friend.
I finally dragged him back into our bed around 5:30 trying desperately to get a few winks. The back of my eyelids are beautiful, and it's too bad we only got to hang out for a little bit, cause I could look at them all. day. long.

Adam woke up and forfeited his warm spot in bed to a sleepy eyed little lady. Within 30 seconds of her arrival, the midnight beast had awoken to play. Squeals abound. Good-bye sweet, sweet eyelids. I miss you so. I rolled off the bed and stepped on a mountain of blanket and a snoring boy that had made himself comfortable on my dirty carpet somewhere around 2am. That kid can sleep anywhere.

In an attempt to take some of my bed with me, I crawled into my robe and slippers. Plodding downstairs with a squeaking baby in my arms, I realize it's Friday. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. We can do this.

Slowly but surely, all the children appear like prairie dogs. The snuggles are delicious, the halitosis, not so much. But I'll take what I can get. The coffee is ready, and my wonderful man hands me some fried eggs on a plate.  I look over, and he's eating his out of a dirty pyrex measuring cup. He responds to my raised eyebrow with a shrug. Delicious, but a little weird. Bless him.

The euphoria doesn't last, cause we all know he has to go to work. It's Friday, not vacation.
Once he's out the door, I'm bombarded with the daily question: "Can we watch an episode of Clone Wars...pleeeeeeease?" Historically, I can count on one finger the times that a video in the morning has resulted in a good day of school, but I decide to ignore my instincts and say yes. I was up all night, so my problem solving gears are broken. Smashed, like something that's been...smashed, really well.

Yes. Turn it on. Pronto.

Two episodes later, I make them promise me that when I tell them it's actually time for school, they can't argue...and that if they do, I'll take away all their happiness. And their toothbrushes. Grrr.

Where am I during all of this screen time? Amnesia.  I type this line a mere 8 hours later, and I can't tell you what happened while Anakin Skywalker was saving his padawan. Those minutes have been fully erased from my mind. I would love to say that something got done, like laundry, or dishes...but since both those piles are still there, I'm gonna have to go with 'no'. The force is strong with this one.

Around 10, we finally turned it off and opened the blinds to reveal an absolutely breathtaking day. Hallelujah! Spring is a real thing. Something about those sunbeams transformed all of our groggy brains and put us into hyper-drive. Without a word, each boy pulled out their reading book, curled up in a sunny spot, and entered another universe. It was magnificent. Apparently, they really value their happiness...or their toothbrushes. Either way, there is little that pleases a homeschooling mother more than her child devouring a good book.

This lasted a few minutes, until nap time was over for little man.

Having five kids means that no one lives in silence. One must develop the ability to function and listen in the midst of chaos, or otherwise suffer the defeat of hearing nothing clearly for the entirety of childhood. One child is asking how to carry numbers while subtracting, another spelling out loud, hit, it, bit, sit..., the oldest pacing the kitchen asking for another snack, and someone else yelling from upstairs about needing a wipe. All piled atop of one another, while the smallest continues to squawk and pull my hair and refuse to be put down.

Most days, this cacophony draws me into a very dark place. I have explained borrowing three hundred forty nine times, I already know how to spell, you can NOT have another snack, and wipe your own butt. Today, however, I am amazed at the hope that the sunshine has brought to our dining table. I flit (spelling word!), answering each question without yelling. I wander into the kitchen and clean a counter, come back, answer another question, wipe a poopy behind, glide back downstairs, move on to the next spelling word and repeat the process until they've all finished. I felt like a domestic goddess.

Everything seems better in the light. The rooms are still dirty with the shades wide open, but something about those little dust particles dancing in the sunbeams makes even garbage look beautiful. With the spelling done and the carrying completed, I kicked them outside into the balmy 45 degree day. They chose sandals and sweatshirts (true Michigan-born babies), and rode their bikes back and forth on our block for an hour until lunch.

When they came in, their hair smelled of sunshine.  

That's up there with the smell of newborn babies. Seriously, someone should bottle that stuff and sell it on the black market. So. Intoxicating. And after the snowiest winter in the history of Ann Arbor, I could have parked my nose on one of their heads and left it there for the remainder of the school day. That has great potential for mommy weirdness though...you have to know your boundaries.

So instead I made lunch. --Three boxes of mac and cheese with veggies and meatballs. That snack at 11 didn't make a dent in their appetites. While I'm chopping up the meatballs, one comes in with a joke:

"Knock knock," he says.
Who's There?
"I'm a poopin."
*eye roll* I'm a poopin who?
"No, not I'm a poopin, ihm a poopin"
*still cutting meatballs* Okay, Ihm a poopin who?
"I'm a poopin"
*sideways glance*
"I know mom, I'm just not good at telling a joke."

I love that kid.

All that stuff ^ is now 48 hours gone. There was more, but considering the fact that two days of my life have passed since those memorable moments, I've completely forgotten all of the wonderful and hilarious things they said in the afternoon. Which is sad, 'cause my kids are funny. Currently, two out of those five hilarious kids are throwing up, which isn't nearly as good fodder for blogging...so I'll spare you the details. But it just goes to show that Master Oogway was right:

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the "present."

Escape from Hermitage

We don't get out much.

When my children were smaller, I blamed it on the difficulty of taking little children anywhere. In fact, for the first year we were living in Ann Arbor, I'm pretty sure we did a whole lot of nothing. Not only that, I also avoided interactions with the rest of the universe. Neighbor and child playing outside? Let's stay in. Community event to attend? Um, I'm good, thanks. Moms getting together for coffee? My baby naps during that time. I could come up with off the cuff excuses to stay inside like it was my job.

In-tro-vert.

When the two boys started walking and talking, they made it clear that they didn't share my desire to hide from civilization, so we started venturing out into the unknown. This brought forward another buried fear of mine: city driving. I fully realize that I do not live in a "large city." This does not matter to my unsubstantiated fears. After the country roads of central Ohio, and the winding switchbacks of southeastern Kentucky, the roads here in Michigan seemed crazy busy. Not only that, I had no idea where anything was. Blast it all. The fear of finding myself going the wrong way on a one-way street, finding a parking spot downtown, or trying to navigate interstates, kept us in the northeast corner of town for another year. Thank God for U of M buses. Without them, my children would have remained uncultured swines.

Once we had three children, for some inexplicable reason, it started to get easier. I think I could probably attribute it to the fact that -once you have three kids- you realize that chaos is to be expected. You let go of your preconceived notions of a good day out, and you're willing to accept pretty much anything as a success. Did we cross the threshold into the outer realm? Yes. Did my children learn something/have fun/see something other than our walls? Yes. Did I remember to bring them all home? 

...yes. 

If two out of the three were accomplished, I could chalk it up to a good trip and move on.

Once we started homeschooling, the pressure I felt to get them out was like a gorilla on my back. As one who was both public and private schooled, I understood the value of field trips and group activities. During those months when we would leave home only on Sunday mornings, I feared that I was failing my children...that they would grow up to be introverts like their mother and flounder in the real world. Not to mention the fact that we never got out of our pajamas. Darn it. *Unsocialized homeschoolers.* 

Must...not...support...stereotypes.

Slowly but surely, I've gotten better at integrating these things into our curriculum. It's always nice when it fits in well with what we're studying. But to be completely honest, the best trips have been the ones that have had absolutely nothing to do with a study unit, and everything to do with getting out and having fun.

This last week, we went with some friends to the children's science museum here in town. We arrived just as two buses were unloading 3,000,000 children into the lobby. It was chaos. Orange shirts everywhere, children running in circles, chaperons running after them...bedlam, I tell you, pandemonium at it's finest.

It. Was. Awesome.

math class

music class

balancing chemical equations

no clue...but it's really cool.

...and meteorology. cause it's a science. 

Did we cross the threshold into the outer realm? You betcha. Did my children learn something/have fun/see something other than our walls? Absolutely. Did I remember to bring them all home?

...yes.

Success.

If Wishes Were Horses: The Evolution of a Dream

Sometime after our first baby was born, I started dreaming about houses. We were renting a three bedroom apartment while Adam was a lab manager at our alma mater. It was plenty of space for the three of us. In fact, looking back at that year...we were swimming in it. But I didn't want an apartment. I wanted a house.

The village we called home at that time -Gambier, Ohio- is a beautiful place. The hills roll just enough, and a river runs through it with well worn fishing holes and bridges for jumping. Then there's the Kokosing Gap Trail that runs from Mount Vernon to Danville. I can still smell the earth alongside the paved path, and hear the river crawling along...hidden behind the leaves of ancient trees.

{nostalgia moment}

Gambier was where our story began, and though both Adam and I were in love with that place, it became clear that it we couldn't stay there. So Adam applied for graduate schools, and our time in Gambier came to a close. We still dream about going back there and settling somewhere in those fields. Key word: dream.

We knew more kids were coming along, so we stayed close to family and moved just north into Michigan. When the time came to apartment shop in Ann Arbor, I was on bed rest with our second baby. Adam and his parents trekked up to U of M and made video tours for me...breaking into campus housing so that I could see what we were getting into. We chose one in faith, and packed all our things into a Uhaul truck.

Family housing at the University of Michigan is a very unique place. Very. Unique. For seven years, we lived with neighbors from every corner of the world. Most conversations were in very broken English and ended abruptly with children running away and a tired parent in pursuit. During that time, we learned more about living alongside other people than we ever had in college. We began to understand what it really looks like to love your neighbor, whether you feel like it or not. There was little space (as our family doubled in size), and even less privacy. Shared walls, shared play areas, shared dislike of graduate school and Michigan winters...  It was a lot like coffee: wonderful and terrible all at the same time.

There are some days that I still miss it. A lot.

I brought three babies home to those small rooms.

--

I watched my children grow, learning to fail and rise again to keep trying...

There was a whole lot of life lived within those walls.

-----

One night, about half way through our stay there, Adam and I had a rare evening out and we took a bus ride downtown. We stopped by Borders, grabbed a coffee to share and wandered through the rows and rows of words. I turned a corner to find Adam, sitting on one of those tiny little round stools, fully enraptured in this:

Pause.

Early on in our relationship, I spent a semester in New York City and fell in love with the speed and excitement of city life. After 5 years of living in cornfields for college, we seriously discussed moving to a big city together.  Adam holding a book with a barn on the cover like that wasn't a complete surprise...but it certainly wasn't where we were originally headed.

He handed it to me, splayed open to a page about composting toilets... So. Romantic.

I raised an eyebrow, shrugged, and said that if he was interested, we should buy it and read...
And so we did.

Every page was magical. Well...every page except the one about composting toilets. I would read, turn the pages, read more, ignore the dishes, read more, ignore my children, read more. It was an addiction...very similar, in fact, to the way my children now drool over a Lego magazine. I had never felt anything like this before.

Land lust.

I will share some of my homestead centerfolds with you...

five acres. divided perfectly. so. beautiful. must. look. away...

it's like a utopia. the rows are so straight. and green. and edible. drool.

duck. houses. that is all.

And that was how it began. My dream about a house turned into a dream about a house on five acres with chickens, pigs, a cow, and maybe sheep. A root cellar, an orchard, rotating fields and dirt under our fingernails.

Soon after this obsession began, we came across a movie called Sweet Land. A beautiful story that illustrates perfectly the desire to work hard and make something from the land, and through that work comes the birth of a love that transcends the changing of times and the challenges of pouring your life into that land. 

I can not fully explain how badly we wanted this...to work our own land with our bare hands, to pay our dues in sweat and sore muscles, standing side by side in a field that grew food for our children. Suffice it to say that I'm pretty sure we can credit a baby to that movie night. Desire is transferable.

That was seven years ago.

All of that dreaming began in graduate school, where nothing...nothing...was clear. The future was uncertain, so although the housing market was perfect, we knew we couldn't buy. So we waited. Graduate school ended, and a post doc began, and we watched the market slowly rebound. The future was still uncertain, but I watched for houses anyway, trying not to get attached to anything I saw, or to dream do deeply. 

It was then that we decided, since we couldn't buy our own place yet, we would at least move out of family housing and into an actual house with a yard and a garage. Anything to get closer to our dream, even if it was just a rental, and really a step sideways instead of forward. 

But in some ways it was closer. This house feels like home.  We've filled it with us, and added even more of us to make it extra special full of us-ness. 

The kids have worn in the swing set and run circles into the carpets, and put ample holes in the walls with elbows and heels. They've decorated and redecorated their rooms to fit their monthly obsessions, and turned every corner of this house into fodder for make believe. 

It has certainly become our home.

Yet still, even now...

I wake in the mornings and long to look out of my window and see

-not the back door of a neighbor-

but the ingress of creation and life.

A land, a sweet land, that I can bury my hands in, and pour my soul out upon. 

I don't know when I will wake to that dream. Probably not this year, maybe the next...perhaps even further down the road. I certainly hold out hope. But in the meantime, in the mornings when I open my eyes to see the haloed carpet and holy walls...

I will remind myself that home is what we make of it.

Talking to Strangers

Grocery shopping with five kids isn't for the faint of heart. I do it as infrequently as possible, and always with a list, a straight face, a clenched jaw, and the intense desire to disappear in the wine aisle while the five children run free among the coolers of ice cream and frozen pizza. You would think that -in comparison- shopping with only one would be a breeze. *chortle*

------

When our youngest was born, it was fairly evident within the first week that we had ourselves a crier. Our first four babies had been pretty easy, as long as they were being held.  But this little guy...he would scream and scream, arching his back and writhing out of our arms, no matter what we did, or how much we jiggled. Sleep eluded us at night, and rest during the daylight hours was a phantom. The other kids worried terribly over this, and did their best to help ease my aching back muscles by taking turns walking the floor with their baby brother.

Around 9pm every evening, he would finally calm down for about an hour, only to awaken again with a vengeance and scream for an hour or so longer.  It was during this sweet spot one evening that I decided to go grocery shopping.  I dared not leave little man at home with his daddy, because -even if nothing helped when he was screaming- having mama around always helped the most.  So, I strapped the still screaming baby in the car seat, grabbed my shopping list, and pulled out of the garage.

He screamed the whole way to the store, slowly loosing vigor and sounding more and more like a strangled duck as the minutes dragged on. The moment I pulled into the Meijers parking lot, he fell asleep. Just in time. I strapped on my Ergo carrier, and gingerly lifted his sob wracked body from beneath the straps of his seat.  I tucked him into the carrier and hugged him against my chest in the hopes that the smell of mommy would keep him content.  I breathed a quick prayer and shut the van door. 

As I was grabbing the diaper bag from the front seat, another van pulled in beside mine, and a young mom hauled a baby seat from the back and plopped her happy baby into a cart. I didn't stick around to chat or even smile.  I was on a mission...but beyond that, I didn't want to talk to anyone, and certainly not to a mother whose small child was easy. Not tonight. 

The first thirty minutes of my quest through Meijers were peaceful. I was stopped more than once by sweet old ladies who wanted to peek into the carrier, or know how old he was, or tell me how cute he was.  I started to relax a bit, and slowed my step...I even looked at things that weren't on the list. Hooray, I thought to myself, I can do this.  

It may have been the cold air that woke him, but the peace abruptly ended by the frozen chicken. There was no slow crescendo. It was a sforzando of mass proportions. I pulled him out of the carrier and jiggled and hushed and rocked. Nothing. Switched to the sling. Not having it. 

My grocery cart, full to the brim with slowly melting food, could not be ignored any more than my siren of a child. All that could be done was to finish the trip in record time and blood-curdling glory. I tucked him in my arm and under my chin so that I could push the cart with one hand and my hips and then proceeded through the last three aisles, grabbing anything that looked like it might alleviate world hunger. 

A moment before, the store had seemed empty. But now, every soul had emerged from the shadows and was staring. I could feel their eyes burning holes. Some eyes spoke pity, others anger, some disdain. But every one of them was on me, the woman with the screaming infant in the grocery at 10:30pm. What a terrible fool.

I made it to the check out, and pried every item one by one out of my cart while he screamed in my arms. Eventually I stopped apologizing to the people around me and just kept my eyes on the floor. The longer I waited, the more he screamed, and the more they stared.  And low and behold, there she was, three rows down: the mama with the silent happy baby, checking out at the same time as me. 

shame. anger. frustration. hopelessness. 

The cashier took pity on me and sent another employee along to help me get to the van. Once the groceries were in the trunk, I slumped into the front seat with the screaming banshee. Diaper change, gripe water and nursing were all futile. Nothing would stop him. Nothing. I sat there, staring into his squinted eyes, wondering what I had done wrong...how was a mother of five fully incapable of calming her baby? Why had I been foolish enough to bring him along, to take this risk?

Then she came out.

Baby still tranquil, grocery shopping done. She was there, in all her maternal glory. As I sat in my car, just trying to breathe, she calmly unloaded her food and set her happy baby in his spot in the van. She climbed into the front seat and started the car. But she didn't leave. She just sat there looking down.

I looked away, and tried not to notice that she was still there...until I saw out of the corner of my eye that she was no longer in her van, but was approaching mine. I glanced up to see her standing outside my window with a napkin in hand. 

I rolled down the glass, she handed me the napkin, and I heard her whisper, "Hang in there."

Choking back sobs, I nodded, and she walked back to her van, and drove away.

I looked down into my clenched fist, and through my fountain of tears, saw this:

There are many different types of crying. Some tears are joyful, others not. Some cries are shallow and short-lived. But some cries, and the ones that do the most good, come from deep down in your toes. I sat in that front seat and sobbed, with each breath reaching back to support yet another wave of release. Minutes crawled on, as little man and I shared our burdens through our tears with only the angels to hear us. I cried out of exhaustion, and sadness, and frustration.

But it was more than that.

I cried because, in a moment where I felt that all was lost, and there was no light to be seen, God made it very clear to me that He had not made any mistakes. Through the words of a perfect stranger, God had spoken to the depths of my mothering soul: words of peace and comfort that pulled back the dark veil of despair and filled me instead with something I had lost. Hope.