Enjoying the Small Things

Enjoying the Small Things

Eggs and Baskets and Bunny Ears Forever: Easter 2019

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We leisured yesterday, like the Sundays of my childhood when we’d come home from church to roast in the crock pot and settle into quiet corners of the house after dinner while grown-ups napped. But before the leisure, there was the early rising (“We get to take naps later today, right?” Brett asked.) due to three kids who sensed the Easter Bunny’s presence, thus taking no heed to our “Please go back to sleep” requests. We corralled them into one bedroom to entertain each other until it was light enough for their squeals not to wake the neighbors.

Looking for signs of the bunny…

For the record, I’m doing this forever–the eggs, the baskets, the bunny ears. When they’re in their twenties–yes, then too. I put a can of fancy millennial beer in Austyn’s basket this year–I’m not above that. If my own kids are busy someday with their own wild and precious lives, I’ll do it for the neighbor kids, Mrs. Muddle style. But let there always be eggs and baskets and bunny ears.

Big hits this year–the golden egg…

(Nella found it with Brett’s help)

…the color pink.

…putting a puzzle together with clues to find their baskets.

And kawaii gifts. Lainey’s way into kawaii and artsy stuff, so it was so much fun filling her basket knowing how happy she’d be.  Oh to have kids who love tiny shit as much as I do! Stockings and Easter baskets are so easy!

File under Things That Make Me Happy: This picture and these two together.

We’ve taken this same photo in this same spot for several years now–I love seeing them grow. I hope Grandma Dog is in next year’s photo too.

The big boys were home which makes everyone happy.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it–so we ate the same things we always eat on Easter morning. Egg casserole, sticky buns and stiff crispy bacon, nearly burnt.

Lainey named all the placeholder ducks.

And after recovery naps and lots of couch & movie lounging, we gathered again for dinner, this time in our church clothes that never make it to church.

Ending our holiday with “the good shot” after 24 takes where none of the kids are looking or two are exchanging potty jokes.  But this one…two out of three looking, we’ll take it!

Hope you all had a wonderful Easter. The countdown to summer is official.

4 Things I’m Working on in Parenting

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As my kids grow and change and our family learns more about ourselves and each other, I find the focus of my parenting goals changes as well. Sometimes, important parenting themes last for a season and with more experience and knowledge of who our kids are, the things that are important to us shift. A few things I’m working on right now…

Less Labeling
Oh how we all love a good label, a way both to define ourselves and save us the effort of figuring someone else out. “Save me the trouble, just tell me your Enneagram number.”  Vegan. Paleo. Extrovert. Introvert. Suffers from anxiety. The Funny One. The Athletic One. The Artsy One. Enneagram 7. I love a good personality label as much as anyone else, but the challenging thing about labels is that we are ever changing (especially kids!), and when we label ourselves and everyone else knows that label, it can be difficult to break free from that generalization or evolve into something new. Yes, Lainey will probably always be more shy than my other two, and Dash stands out as our spirited family entertainer. I will reference those labels from time to time, but I never want to lock my kids into personality traits because I need a way to define them. I don’t want to be so loud with my “She’s shy! She’s shy!” proclamation that it drowns out the many times Lainey’s lively and extroverted with friends. It’s very freeing and enlightening to pull back a bit on the labels for my kids and delight in all the ways they surprise me–they’re constantly evolving, and I want them feel permission (and an invitation!) to do so. I loved one of the stories Kelly Corrigan shared in Tell Me More about her friend who adopted a baby, consequently having no immediate inherited labels to attach the baby’s personality to like we often try to do.

“MH and Leon had accepted the call to raise a child, not by railroading her into becoming a gratifying mashup of biology and dreams, but by allowing her to reveal her nature over time, in no particular order, with switchbacks and reversals along the way.” Twelve years later, MH still says, “I don’t know who this kid is.” Now she adds, “But she does. She knows exactly who she is. I’m just along for the ride.” 
– From Tell Me More, Kelly Corrigan

Less Telling Them to “Be Kind,” More Complimenting “I Love How Kind You Are”
“Be kind!” “Look out for the kid who needs a friend!” “Make sure you include!” “I hope you were nice to her!” I’ve been hammering my kids with these messages since the day they were born, but at some point, constantly instructing “Be kind” suggests that I think my kids wouldn’t be kind on their own without my reminders. Lainey and I were recently talking about a situation at school with some girls, and I immediately jumped in with my obligatory, “Well I hope you were kind. You didn’t add to the drama, did you?” From her reaction, I realized my tone and questioning suggested that I didn’t trust her to do the right thing on her own. Of course she was kind! She’s proved so many times that she is kind and has been complimented many times by others for being a good friend to all. I want to do less nagging and more recognizing her natural inclination to be compassionate. I’m trying to switch those “I hope you were kind” responses to compliments that show I trust her and am proud of her: “I’m so glad she has you because that’s one thing you are so good at–being kind to everyone.”

More Night Time Reading
We’ve been a reading family since my kids were born and have children’s books galore in our home, but I’ll admit we used to do better with the consistent bedtime reading together ritual when they were all really little. However, I’ve been reading The Enchanted Hour, and the data regarding the benefits of reading aloud to your kids is stunning and enough to challenge me to recommit. The kids are loving it so much and holding me accountable. There’s no way I can get away with putting them to bed without reading aloud now–Dash won’t have it. Now if I can just convince him that we don’t need to read 7 books every night.

Less Bemoaning Falling Off the Horse, More Shutting Up and Getting Back on the Horse
The lapsed read aloud before bed tradition is a perfect example of how you can easily pick something back up in parenting without loads of guilt. As in other areas of life where we fizzle out on commitments–eating healthy, working out, waking up early–parenting offers a smorgasbord of opportunities to fizzle and fail. I want to spend less time bemoaning the fact that I fell out of a good habit and focus more on simply getting back to business. We are human. We’re going to fall off the horse many times. What sets a successful person apart from others is one’s ability to get back on the horse and keep riding without all the drama of beating yourself up for falling off. Better eating, healthier screen time rules, more reading, more snuggling, more play time together, better listening–it’s never too late to try again.

The Cars of Our Past

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We’re passing out awards here today for the deserving cars from our youth. If you managed to go through your teens unscathed by the character-building experience of watching your friend climb in her shiny barely used Bonneville while you repositioned the duct tape on your Ford Escort station wagon fender so it wouldn’t fall off when you slammed the door, good for you. I, on the other hand, took a class from The School of Humility, and you know what? I’m glad. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t drive my car and feel like the coolest person on the planet when I push the window button…and the windows go down–what?!

There’s a few rules I gathered from years of driving character-building cars to make those years easier, and I’d like to share them with you today.

Name Your Car 
Clunkers are automatically cool when you name them. Personify them with characteristics and talk about them like they are human. Inherited your grandpa’s boat a.k.a. Crown Victoria? She’s Big Marge, and she never starts the first time you try because she’s lazy and likes to make decisions on her terms. Also, she’s done with men. I often chose names that started with “The” for my cars because it worked for The Terminator and The Godfather.

Master the “That’s funny, I can’t find my car” Confused Shuffle
Leaving Happy Hour with a crowd of work friends and feeling a little embarrassed about the piece of junk you’re headed to in the parking lot? Pretend you can’t remember where you parked it, and shuffle around the parking lot “searching” until everyone has driven away. Look confused. If someone offers to drive you around until you find it, smile and shoo them away: “This happens all the time. You know me. Head in the clouds, ha ha ha. I’m good, you go on–I’ll find it.” This happened to me on many occasions.

Take It To the Moon. 
At some point, the whole “I’m embarrassed of my car” thing is going to get old, and you’ll eventually stumble into some real confidence, finally able to proudly own the uniqueness of a busted up box-on-wheels that smells like cheese. At this point, pretend your car is a rare gem and accessorize it Vegas style. Hang dice on the rear view mirror. Buy the gold chain license plate holder. Search the Internet for a hood ornament that sends a message of power and class, possibly this one. Purposely valet park everywhere you go and throw your keys to the attendant with a wink and say, “Take care of her, she’s special.” My dad does this with his 1994 LeBaron convertible which we all call The LeBenz because he thinks it’s a Mercedes. He cranks dance music up really high when he drives it–with the top down, of course–and waves at all who pass as if they wish they were him.

Now with no further ado, I’d like to pass out the awards to the three cars of my youth that helped shape who I am today. I dug through some old photo bins in search of pictures to illustrate these cars but found nothing. Brett, on the other hand, leaped at the chance to offer his old photos because he basically has a small suitcase packed with nothing but faded photos of all the cars he owned in his youth–and he owned a lot. Cars were important to him. He posed like Knight Rider next to his cars for photos.

I was beginning to wonder why I didn’t have any pictures of me standing next to my old cars until I realized maybe it’s because when you’re driving a teal Ford Escort wagon with two missing hubcaps and the fender strapped on with duct tape, you’re not like, “Hey Dad, will you take a picture of me in my bathing suit next to my car?’

Sweet Pea – After my parents divorced, my mom and siblings and I moved in with a pastor’s family. Eventually we all moved together to a big home out in the country where several families from our church lived together. It was as weird as it sounds, but I also have many vibrant memories from those years. We all fit and traveled together in Sweet Pea, our huge passenger Scooby Doo van. She was white with a big fat sky blue stripe painted across her middle. I’ve never seen another van like her. She once took us on a 3-week trip out west where her horn broke and wouldn’t turn off. It was just a constant honk as Sweet Pea glided across mountain highway. When the give-or-take 500 people inside got tired, we’d curl up in whatever empty square inch we could find to try and sleep. I once woke up in the middle of the night on a road trip and realized I was crouched completely under the back bench seat. Thank God I was homeschooled because Sweet Pea wasn’t a van you’d want to be caught dead climbing out of at middle school drop off. Years later, after we’d grown up and moved on, my brother and sister-and-law would swear they’d catch sightings of her in the town where we grew up. Sweet Pea was a legend and sometimes I wonder if it was all just a dream.

The Celebrity (not my car picture, but similar)

Okay, The Celebrity wasn’t a very original name because it was, in fact, a Chevy Celebrity, but the name also conjures images of red carpets and paparazzi, and let’s just The Celebrity needed that because she was anything but noteworthy–so bland that even her paint job had lost its shine, worn down to a sort of odd matte navy blue. She looked like someone buffed her with a Brillo pad. But she was my first car, her keys given to me in a wrapped box at my homeschool high school open house by my dad who I was just getting to know after having been separated from him for years. I think she was a Celebrity Eurosport–Eurosport being a fancy name they used to attach to shitty cars to make you think you’re getting something really special. Yes, I’d like to upgrade to the Geo Prism Eurosport, please. The Celebrity was a faithful servant up until a 16-year-old ran a stop sign out in the country on her way to school and hit me. She wasn’t going that fast and no one was hurt, but when your car is worth about $600 and you have PLPD insurance, you just kiss it goodbye and call it a loss. Which led me on the hunt for a new car. My dad and Gary scanned the papers until they found a winner. On the way to go see it, I remember telling them, “I really don’t care what it is unless it’s a station wagon. I’m not driving a station wagon.”

The Staysh  (picture not my car but so close!)

I winced when I saw her, but my dad convinced me that it would be the greatest car for driving my nieces around. So we bought the teal Ford Escort station wagon which quickly became The Staysh, the car joked about more than any other car in our family. First of all, she was trashed 99% of the time. Like the kind of trashed that would allow me to comfortably live in it for 6-8 weeks if I ever found myself stranded. Piles of clothes. Books. Food. Paperwork. Old purses. Kids’ clothes. Toys. 18 Pairs of Shoes. Numerous make-up cases. I once drove around with a vacuum in the backseat because I was helping my sister clean offices. There was no place for anyone to sit. When things broke, I just reattached them with duct tape. The starter broke so many times that a mechanic told me he could fix the problem by installing a push-button starter, except he had to install it near the floor. So every time I started her, I’d have to hold the brake and then bend over, disappearing from sight for a minute while I pushed the button on the floor. I got in a fender bender and reattached the fender with–yep, duct tape. One early evening I was driving home on the last stretch of dirt road that led to my dad’s driveway. The setting sun straight ahead blinded my vision, but I was sure I could have driven it with my eyes closed, so I just kept driving. Into a tree. That was the last day the passenger door opened. But I kept driving her, my loyal Staysh. Until I took a job in Florida and closed the chapter on humbling cars with character.

How fun is it reminiscing our old cars? There isn’t a family get together where one of these blasts from our past doesn’t get brought up, and we end up in tears, laughing about the memories. Do you have a memorable car from your youth? Did you name your cars? I want to hear all the car stories, I must know all the names!