How to Blow Your Top at Church: A Guide

In case you were wondering how to go completely off the rails at church, I've made some notes:

A) Decide you are fed up! with leaving church because a certain kid is getting loud and screamy, but then later coming back to church because you have a calling. A separate calling, in addition to your life-long parenting gig of your extraordinary child.

B) Decide to stay with said kid in primary, because that is technically where nine-year-olds go during Sunday School. Damn the torpedoes.

C) Watch tiny super-smart three-year-olds perfectly recite their speaking parts in practice for the primary program next week.

D) Gaze at your squirming nine-year-old who is loudly repeating "Shhhh!" without understanding the concept.

E) Realize it was a giant mistake to do this; this awful side-by-side comparison of Jack with all the other children.

F) Take Jack to the senior nursery, where he is warmly welcomed by Susan G., who is an angel person and loves to watch over Jack in the nursery.

G) Watch Jack settle down happily among a roomful of little girls who are half his size, to play with toys.

H) Hold it together through the rest of church......until your neighbors Fred and Shirley stop you in the parking lot and ask you what's wrong.

I) Cue the meltdown (mine, not Jack's). Unload to your friends about the misery of being the mom while being sick for three weeks straight, about being tired of the messes, about not having the energy to care about Halloween, about Jack & church, and Jack & his brothers, about Jack & the shredded house, about Jack & me.

J) Feel a little better, post-rant.

K) Feel grateful that F&S reached across the ravine where I stood with Jack, and snatched us back toward them. And held onto us. And made us feel like we belonged.

Bossy Toddlers Not Allowed: Or, Arby's is Not Burger King

It's been a loooong time since Dutch and I went on a date. Like a real date. With dinner AND a movie, and a stop for some groceries on the way home.

We are super romantic, see.

A real date is not running to get sandwiches at 9:00 pm while the little boys are asleep and the biggest boy is in charge.

A real date involves the cinema.

It is not sneaking away when people are sleeping and you want to be sleeping yourself. It is decidedly before bedtime.

This is the good news: after a lengthy dating dry spell, the hubs and I are back.

I wanted to link arms with my husband and skip, whistling through the theater parking lot, but Dutch isn't cheesy like that. He doesn't care to make a scene.

We talked about things, like the way our toddler bosses everyone around. Kid is such a sass pants.

Dutch reminded me of the road trip when my dad saw a freeway sign for Arby's and asked everyone in the car, "Arby's---that's not Burger King is it?"

The only way to respond to that question, btw, is: "No Dad. Arby's is not Burger King."

We shared a chocolate malt.

We saw a movie.

We stopped for groceries.

We returned home to find that Jack had enjoyed himself a sweet evening treat of a heaping 5 lb. bowl of m&m's. Seriously kid. Save some for the food storage.

We call it our date night, but it's really just couples therapy. (Dinner + cinema) - children = a cleansing of the emotional palate.

Welcome to Our Messy Home

Since I have been under the weather, I have come to terms with living in a messy house. I actually saw this as progress, as Younger Me would have crawled from her sickbed to shine the bathrooms and put away everyone's backpacks anyway.

I am mildly pleased with myself for accepting the squalor.

When Charlie created an art installation from the pumpkins and Jack Be Little gourds in our entryway, I left them as they were---which is to say, underfoot and all over the hall.

When Jack ate a brownie (or three) on the couch, I didn't panic about the crumbs. I left them to get even more crumbly. Then I vacuumed them up a few days later.

When Jack and Charlie spent the end of Fall Break unloading the linen closet all over the upstairs hallway, I rolled my eyes and left it alone. It's a wonder to behold: my upstairs hallway covered in rugs and duffel bags, quilts and a couple of small Christmas trees. Jack's attention to detail is impressive; he wrapped the trees with lights, and then wrapped the lights with extension cords.

While I'm newly messy, I'm not a hoarder.

At my core, I'm really the anti-hoarder. This is because hoarders hate to part with material goods, even if it means that keeping them will result in a kitchen that looks like a landfill.

I'm anti-hoarding because I throw everything away. To a fault. Someone isn't directly using it, but it's on my counter? Get it out of my sight. Trash that pointless junk. Henry has started declaring that it would be really helpful if the half-eaten muffin and the homework on the counter were there when he returned from the bathroom.

Sometimes I dream of employing a house cleaner, who would receive the following instructions:

Please clean the bathrooms, thoroughly, before dusting/mopping/vacuuming etc. Any items (socks, toys, Christmas trees, shredded photographs, suitcases, castoff vacuums, etc.) which impede the cleaning may be tossed in the garbage without a second thought. Proceed with abandon.

The bottom line is that while I appreciate cleanliness, all my children, save one, lack the age or ability to be productive housekeepers. We are NOT a band of happy cleaners, collectively sweeping and polishing our way through the task at hand.

We are a one-woman show (with occasional bursts of help from Dutch, H, and the Chach), not caring overly much about the perpetual piles. Or the dirty floors. Or the furry bathrooms.

What can I say? Sorry not sorry.

Train Wrecks are Part of the Journey

Part I

I am convinced that the beastly illness which turned me into a seasick, shivering automaton for the past 12 days can be largely blamed on the fact that I am run down and weary. And possibly immuno-suppressed.

Being a wreck of a mother for the better part of the past two weeks because of a virus taught me a few things:

1. Don't let yourself become so run down that you become weak and susceptible to any passing bug that desires to ruin your life for a couple weeks.

2. Don't eat Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup when you "think" your upset stomach is improving. It is mighty bad coming back up.

3. Zofran. Where have you been all my life?

4. Mostly, just don't let yourself get so blasted run down and weary, or you really will regret it.


Part II

I've decided that, though I love autumn for a great many reasons, "because it makes my life easier when people go back to school" is not one of them. Life remains very complicated.

It's structured, but it's crazy. It's beautiful outside, but it is so awfully busy all the time. It lures you to the much-too-crowded zoo for an epic meltdown with one boy, and then rewards you with a follow-up death virus.

When we are in the throes of late July/most of August, fall is the mirage that keeps me plodding forward, hopeful. But the fall is challenging in it's own way. This year, it's kicking my can.

I do not wish for this post to be pure whine and discontent. It's simply reality. I don't make stuff up, to write about in this blog. I discuss what's real and what's happening. I used to self-edit these phases, but now I don't. I write them down.

The train wrecks are part of the journey.

I'll Move Past the Crabbiness. Probably.

I've been too much of a Negative Nancy of late.

I'm going to stay crabby (briefly) and blame the unwanted virus that has wiped me out for a solid week. Perhaps I shall speak directly to the disease.

Dear Horrible Stinky Virus,

I don't like you. Here's why:

You have made parenting especially hard for me recently. 

You have no regard for a person's need to SLEEP through the night.

Thanks to you, I lack the energy to get the laundry done or the floors clean. We live in filth. Gracias.

Because of you, I learned all about severe dehydration. I now know that when I can't keep any fluids down for a few days, I also lack the strength to get up off the bathroom floor after.....purging.

You taught me that standing and walking don't work for dehydrated people, and that the room will spin. Oh yes, the room will spin.

You schooled me in paying a visit to the ER, where I was poked and jabbed NINE times (NINE TIMES, Mrs. Beuhler?) including on both sides of my neck (which is very vampirish in a not romantic sort of way) while looking for a vein in which to start an IV. 

I now know the thrill of tossing my cookies into a baggie while sitting in a hospital bed which is surrounded by a doctor, two nurses, my husband, and two of my children. So. Very. Glamorous.

Under your tutelage, I honestly began to appreciate water. Plain, glorious H2O. It makes a person feel human. It's a simple pleasure. Life sustaining, really.

But please don't come back again anytime soon, Virus.

Regards,
Me

I'll move past the crabbiness. Probably.

Tonight I slurped homemade chicken noodle soup delivered to my doorstep by my friend Chris. Manna!

This morning my toddler contentedly sat next to me on the couch watching Bubble Guppies all morning as I dozed off. Thank you Littlest. You are momma's helper.

After dinner, Dutch cleaned the very messy kitchen. He even wheeled out the shop-vac and suctioned up the garden of discarded food beneath Jack's seat at the table. Yay, Dutch!

I think I will survive.

I'd Like Some Cheese With My Whine

There is a villain in my house.

Currently, he is lurking in the shadows, creeping from room to room, and leaving havoc in his wake.

It's totally not even a happy, spooky Halloween-type villain either. Dude is a real jerk. A total bully.

Every special-needs family knows the villain called regression.

I seriously can't stand this creep. He has moved in, uninvited, and has stolen my Jack away. He has stripped my son of so many of the skills and positive behaviors which he had mastered. Those happy times, they are gone now.

We forget about regression, or I do anyway. I tend to always think that things are humming along beautifully, and that we will continue to climb to new heights every blessed day. I forget that my children with special needs do not always climb upward and move forward. There is a lot of meandering, backtracking, leaving the trail, and frankly, completely falling off the mountain.

Charlie is no stranger to regression either. For a period of two months last fall, he was completely potty-trained. I scarcely believe it as I write it, but it is true. He is so far from that beautiful autumn of perfect potty-usage. Now at age five and half, he deuces in the backyard or on his bedroom floor most of the time. (I know, it's TMI, but we talk about poop on this blog).

We were getting to the point with Jack where we could take him places, like Costco or out for cheeseburgers, and could reliably expect his good behavior. He was generally happy when he would arrive home from school, and could usually be found swinging in the backyard, or playing on the iPad while curled up on the couch.

But he has slipped backward. He is biting people at school daily. He is throwing things, like his brother's high chair, across the room, when he gets mad about not getting what he wants.

He is a ball of energy. A whirling dervish. He is constantly seeking sensory input, usually in the form of shredding something important and dropping it off the side of the deck. He is all "Give me your documents, your recipes, and your photographs. I'm gonna shred 'em. Then I'm gonna sprinkle them confetti-like in the backyard. Deal with it, mom." Or this is what he would say if he could talk.

I want happy Jack back.

I want Evil Dr. Regression outta here.

A String of Minor Epiphanies

I had a string of minor epiphanies today.

Yay, me!

Here they are:

1. Bruises and bite marks on one's upper arm bloom into an even more dramatic flower of purple, red, and blue the day after they happen. It's like a fascinating rose garden growing before my eyes. An occupational hazard/rose garden.

2. Sometimes all you have to offer at the family dinner is a loaf of crusty Pugliese bread from Costco you pulled from the freezer and stuck in the microwave. And it is enough. And everyone will dive into it with gusto, alongside the other fancier options.

3. We will always be a circus side show at church, and I am so over it. If you go into it knowing someone (or three) will fall apart and act like rodeo clowns then it's no biggie when they actually do. It's how we roll, and it doesn't make me want to scream at the universe or run screaming down the street while pulling out clumps of my hair anymore. One of us sometimes (always) has to leave church with one or two of our boys. We are fulfilling our calling as parents to kids who can't handle church very much. We are simply doing it in sweatpants. With a triple batch of bran applesauce muffins in the oven. And we are doing it without bitterness. Yay for muffins without bitterness!

4. Perspective changes everything. One's circumstances do not change, but the way one sees them can readily change. It's brilliant in it's simplicity. This calls for some subcategories:
       
         A) If you expect perfection, then reality will always be a disappointment. But if you view every good (or challenging) thing as a gift which contributes to your growth and experience, you will be grateful. Which brings me to...
     
         B) Gratitude is so much better. It just is.

         C) My new goal is to focus on what we have, rather than what we lack.

5. Knowing that someone else has it harder or worse than you doesn't make your life NOT hard. But it can shake you from your reverie and remind you that in one way or another, we are all suffering together. We all struggle with something, or many things, and we can be empathetic and supportive. We can choose compassion. We can be like my friend Marla who elects to always see the good in people, even when you're acting like a pill. We can decide to be nice. We can try to understand.

And thus concludes my introspective self-help blog post.

Pretty Much Craptastic

Memorandum:

To the dad behind us in line today at the zoo playground on the fancy lighthouse-shaped slide: Thank you for being cool and understanding as I hustled my angry, kicking nine-year-old off the stairs and away from the toddlers who apparently were taking way too long for my son's liking.

To my sister: Thank you for trying to help us flee the zoo quickly when the epic meltdown happened, despite your pregnant belly and your two-year-old in your arms.

To the hordes of zoo patrons who stood in our path as we blazed a shrieking trail of tears up that excessively long hill that leads from the arctic animals exhibit to the main gate: I sensed your confusion at the woman plowing like a freight train up the crowded path with her screaming nine-year-old in her grip, and her baby in a little red wagon in her other grip. You were baffled folks, but you mostly just got out of the way.

To Jack: When you get frustrated and overwhelmed by a situation, perhaps we can think of alternative strategies of alerting me to your overwrought state other than sinking your teeth into my upper arm and clamping your jaw down like a vice. Twice.

To the well-coiffed woman in the Audi SUV who asked a woman (who was dragging her tantrumming special-needs son to the car while pulling a baby in a wagon) if she was parked nearby so you could wait for her parking spot: The fact that you rolled down your window and tapped your fingers on your steering wheel impatiently while my son threw his shoes and two cans of soda at my head and then had to be blocked from hitting his baby brother as I loaded the wagon in the car made my day just a tad crappier than it needed to be. You probably didn't pick up on this, so I don't fault you too much.

To myself: Prior to today, you didn't realize that you could successfully navigate Saturday traffic on I15 with a bruised, scraped, and throbbing arm, and a wailing Jack in the front seat because he had to be kept away from attacking the toddler. You probably also never considered that even when you were gasping emotionally for breath so rapidly that it made your extremities go numb, you could still manage steering the car with your unresponsive and lifeless seal-flipper-hands on the wheel.

To Jack, again: I looked at you as I drove us home with my numb seal flippers, and I saw that like me, you were crying. I wished for the billionth time that you could tell me what was wrong so I could know what you need and figure out how to better help you. We were a hot mess today, buddy. But we both eventually calmed down, especially when I rolled down your window and you were in sensory heaven.

To the Classical 89 DJ with the soft, soothing voice: Bet you didn't know that your dulcet tones calmed my PTSD today and turned my attention to a Richard Strauss symphony instead of the disaster behind us. You could put a hyperactive child to sleep, Ms. DJ, and I mean that in the best possible sense.

To the littlest brother: I'm sorry your brother assaulted you, and that we had to leave our outing before we saw the animals (except the elephants and a few monkeys). I'm grateful that you shook it off and slept peacefully the whole way home. Maybe we can try again on a weekday, without the teeming masses. Or the big brother.

To me, again: That sucked. But it's over now. I declare us officially done with what happened back there on Sunnyside Ave. Ain't nobody got time for that.

There's a new season in town: let's eat candy and be witches

Autumn has returned and all is right with the world, for people like me anyway, who believe as F. Scott Fitzgerald did, that "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall." When the air cools and the leaves change, I swear there is a tangible sense of anticipation in the air.

I realize some folks do not share my enthusiasm for colder, wetter weather which is the harbinger of winter. To them, I say, "I feel your pain." I understand because I feel the same dread and despair for summertime, which for me is the season when my children dismantle the house and my mental health goes walkabout. While other people are holding pep rallies because they are mad with joy for summertime, I'm weeping quietly at the prospect of the sun setting at 10:00 PM and thus ensuring my children will never, ever go to sleep.

Different times of year are hard for different people. Let's just agree to disagree on which season of the year is the nicest or the most brutal.

But no matter what your stance on impending January is, who doesn't love to see gorgeous fall leaves, and pile up pumpkins and gourds on the front porch, and eat apples and pumpkin pie? Fall is glorious.

It's the season when Halloween rolls into town in a decrepit old jalopy sounding the ah-ooh-ga! horn, inviting everybody to act silly and spooky because hey, it's sanctioned by an official holiday, people. It's practically a requirement to decorate the house with tinselly black oversized spiders and dress up like the undead. Halloween gives us permission to be weird and funny. It also gives us it's blessing to consume way too many fun-sized candy bars.

What's not to like?

Well there are a few things, actually. If you're a mom with school-aged kids, or if you teach school, you know that while it is heaps of fun, Halloween is way too much work. Between adorning the place with fake cobwebs, prepping each child's costume, and hiding and re-hiding the Costco-sized bag of Halloween candy from certain family members, there is a lot to do before October 31. Henry asks me every year what costume I'm going to wear on Halloween. He can stop asking, though, because I'm always a witch, which he thinks is über boring. What he doesn't realize, however, is that me being a witch doesn't take too much stretching of the imagination.

Basically I believe there are good and bad parts of each season and even each holiday. I love the weather and the autumn activities. I enjoy Halloween, but I am really glad it happens only once a year.

When Halloween actually arrives, it's such a long marathon day of costumes, parties, parades and bingo cards with candy corn game pieces that when it's finally time to trick or treat, I'm ready to curl up in a chair like my Jack. He refuses to parade around in a costume and do all that mind-numbing work of ringing doorbells at the neighbors' houses. If he were verbal, he would tell you that trick-or-treating is for nerds. He prefers pj's, his tablet, and a cozy spot to sit and eat fun-sized candy bars.

I like my son's approach to a holiday which kind of stresses him out: focus on the good parts (like peanut butter cups) and tune out the rest. I'm thinking of applying his method to the upcoming Christmas season, which may include lots of Andy Williams and George Bailey, and absolutely no Elf on the Shelf.

Bite-sized Bitter Pills

I'm reading a book about a Lithuanian girl and her family who were taken by the Soviets and shipped to a work camp in Siberia during the Second World War. It is beautifully written, tragic, and heartbreaking. There are moments of great beauty and tenderness, but the story is too painful for me to tolerate all at once. It's a short book that could be read quickly, but I'm slowly chipping away at it in bits and pieces instead. I can only handle a little at a time.

I have started using this tactic in other areas of my life; little bits of bitterness are easier to swallow than a bucketful.

I do it with housework. Clean a toilet here, vacuum a rug there. Occasionally sweep. Forego dusting---who needs it? It makes for a less-than-glorious-to-behold type of house, but eventually the dirty parts will get cleaned. At some point.

I do this with forms and emails from the school and scheduling doctor appointments.  Tiny steps toward progress. I'll get to it, just don't hold your breath.

I definitely use this approach with facing the more unpleasant aspects of parenting. If potty-training two special-needs boys is like eating an elephant, then I figure that after all these years of trying, I may have worked my way through the front feet and am now chewing on the shoulders.

It's a lot of work, eating an elephant. I'm trying not to look so much at the great expanse of wrinkled gray flesh which lies ahead of me. I'm focusing on the serious poundage I've already metaphorically consumed.

Some day, both those boys will do all their business in the potty. When it happens, I will feel 1) like I have gotten a raise (the cash we drop on Code Brown-supplies is nothing to sneeze at), 2) that we have achieved something arduous and stinky, and 3) unspeakable joy.

I'm aware that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but I'm also tuned into the billions of other steps which take place between the first and the last. You have to start somewhere, and then you just have to keep plodding. Baby steps, plodding forward.

It may be a shuffle, but I'm still moving.