My Heart... Out Loud!

Thanks to the Listen to Your Mother family for sharing so transparently and for making a space for my story.

What a humbling and amazing experience.

Follow this link to watch my 7 minute essay.

Crazy

I watched this TED talk on a friend’s recommendation the other day, and I felt an almost irresistible desire to check myself into a psychiatric care ward (almost).  Her description of intimate, unguarded camaraderie among small groups of women, working together to untangle and rework the complicated threads of identity, wisdom, and human connectedness warmed me clear through!  Immediately, I sifted through the grains of my compulsion, searching for some special explanation, some kernel of clarity about what makes a self-help collective so attractive.  After all, don’t I have friends?  Good friends, even?  Dear, close, intimate, best friends who share hurt and hope in a regular rhythm?  I do!  And yet…..  

On my way to visit one of those friends, which followed hard on the heels of Glennon’s inspiring intrusion into my day, the acreage between pee-your-pants-laughter-and-tears transparency and real, nitty-gritty mental ward transparency sprouted words, and a little bud of an idea began to uncurl.  In case you haven’t yet watched the video (and you really should!), let me sum up the section that gripped me with this brief description:  Glennon drug herself and her sadness and her multi-valanced addictions to the admission desk of a psychiatric hospital and asked for help (asking for help – already a courageous step well to the west of my tight, bumbling, self-sufficient comfort zone).  The help arrived in circles, close circles of women sharing themselves (and not just their stories) with jarring unguardedness, a shedding of what Glennon describes as layers upon layers of Superhero capes – veiled and misnamed addictions meant to shield us from slamming headlong into other hearts.  Glennon’s friends were all broken people clinging to other broken people.  That’s all.

How can I get there?  Did you know (and, of course, you didn’t) that my daughter has recently started to ask me why my face contorts in a rapid succession of unrelated expressions after we walk away from “bumping into” a friend?  I never realized, until I fumbled through my explanation to Olivia, that I silently recap conversations with other people in their entirety (gestures and expressions included), looking for moments when I may have hurt or offended another person….or, sometimes, just trying to get an aerial view of the impression I may have left, the trajectory change that bumping into me may have caused.  Because we do, always, change one another’s trajectories.  I’d like to point to some noble impetus here, like a longing to touch lives for eternity.  More accurately, though, I just think I want to be famous.  I want to be known about (but not necessarily known).  I want to be thought of in a particular way.  “She makes my days better with her (insert one of the following here: wisdom, humor, perspective on child-raising, honest approach to faith, love).”  Yuck!  My cape, my filthy Linus blanket of a self-swaddling shield, is tattooed all over with my impression of other people’s impressions of me!  I am addicted to the illusion of approval!

On the evening of my second miscarriage, I became the last person in the United States of America to sign up for an account on Facebook.  It turns out, I am Mark Zuckerberg’s target demographic!  People can virtually “friend” and “like” me, and I can regularly check in to find out whether or not they do!  It’s like a whole new monogram on my raggedy cape!  (P.S. Zuckerberg may or may not be related to the person who named shiny little jewels of chocolate KISSES, playing right into my conflation of food with affection!  Marketing genius.) 

And in the interest of full disclosure (which seems to be the theme here), after penning that paragraph, I slipped quietly over to see if anyone had commented on a pathetic little apology post I made in one of my half-dozen facebook groups.  One person did.  I “like”d her. 

Let me shift (all the way!) back to my little revelation.  It turns out the fundamental quality that distinguishes Glennon’s therapy groups from my own roundtable friendships may well hinge on the incisive, permeating power of the sign hanging above the front door of the institution.  See, if everyone in the room knows that everyone else knows that everyone’s already broken, then why bother with an impression?  If I know that you know that I do secret and shameful things to my body or my heart or my mind…that I have not only bought into lies, but have carefully crafted them to appeal to and exacerbate my own fear, pain, and self-loathing, then we start at a very different place than Starbuck’s cool….we start at naked and unashamed (like the garden before the fall?).  See, I’m already here.  I’ve already “admitted” myself.  I know that the word “crazy” comes loaded with all kinds of pejorative pain (and I want to hurt exactly no one), but since pain is the tenor of this post (and because I just issued a prophylactic apology anyway), and since a single phrase changed my whole way of thinking about conversation, I’m going to change it’s inflection here by changing its context:  The only thing that could free people to speak together naked as they came is the disarming, unspoken acknowledgement that “after all, we’re all crazy here.”  All of us.

What if the people I love, all of them, have secret shame and untidy hearts and sullied minds and broken souls?  And what if I don’t need to leave an impression….just make a little space in the world, in my world, for other people to seep out around the seams of their own capes?  And what if I walk in believing that other people arrive expecting to do the same?  What if we begin with the assumption that, after all, “we’re all crazy here,” and proceed from there?  (And, then when people screw up and say or do scandalous, hurtful, thoughtless things….well, that’s because they’re crazy.  Since I am, too, I have plenty of room under my cape for such things and such people.  After all…..).

On that afternoon, after Glennon metaphysically stripped me bare, I made an experiment of her insight.  In a socially cumbersome moment, I went ahead and made myself all the way apparent with an open heart for whatever my friends (old and new) brought to our little round table.  Over and over, in my head (disassociated facial expressions notwithstanding) I repeated, “After all, we’re all crazy here,” each time loosening the thin ribbons of a hundred capes cinched tight around my throat.  I think, for ineffable moments of lung-filling conversation, we were, together, naked and unashamed – capeless, messy women blundering through life and motherhood….pulled over together at a rest stop on the curb of this superhighway for superheroes.  It was a delicious little respite, before I unfortunately veered almost immediately back between the white lines of illusion and approval.

As my awkward little Facebook apology moment signals, I have been mostly careening down the fast lane of acceptance for the last couple of intervening days….and I (of course) managed to blunder (again)….leaving an impression that I’d like to change….an impression from a conversation evidenced by a follow-up replay of a ten or fifteen facial expressions and gestures indicating what I said and what I might otherwise have said and what I would like to have said, etc.  I’m a sorry little superhero. 

I forgot to remember the sign hanging above the entrance door.  I forgot that, after all, we’re all crazy here. 

And I know that God’s grace covers my crazy better than any cape of my own invention, covers it by washing the word well away.  And I’m beginning to believe in a deeper way that He has given me these circles of friends to share this journey and not merely bump into one another along the path. 

In my home, I don’t think I’ve yet created a space where my kids and husband feel fully comfortable capeless.  It’s fits and starts of hopeful shamelessness, and then I set about “parenting” everyone.  Tomorrow, I want to carve grace above every door frame, making every room in this house completely safe for a handful of crazy kids to grow up and out a little more alongside their openly crazy mama.  I want to give love room to breathe, unstrangled by the “Well-behaved” capes they tie on to serve impressions that I expect them to leave…on my behalf.  I want to lay it out like a mat beside my front door…under a rack of hooks where people can hang their capes when they walk in.  I long for messy grace to come in and disrupt this death march of perfection, where we stomp to a cadence of lies decked out in stories to shield our souls.  I want “home,” for my kids (and for everyone welcome here), to be a garden where they can romp naked and unashamed.  I’m ready to give it a try.  After all….we’re all crazy here. All of us. 

Learning the Mother Tongue

(This is the essay I shared at the Listen to Your Mother event last week. It feels even more vulnerable to post it here, without the podium to mediate! That said...)


Having nursed my two oldest children until they were practically able to write about the experience themselves, I was completely unprepared for the gauntlet of bottle-and-formula paraphernalia that adopting infant triplets would prompt me to run. In fact, when I first encountered a stiff-bristled nipple brush at Target, I involuntarily clutched my own breasts and gasped, “what woman would do that to herself!?” In time, I learned it was designed to scrub latex. This epiphany heralded the first in a long line of lessons that adoption would re-teach me about the language of motherhood.

When my first two cried out in colicky rage, I cried too, wondering why, at 3 a.m., they hated sleep so fiercely. At the same hour, six years later, I juggled three four-month-olds to silence a symphony of screams. This time, though, I half-smiled, awed by having been chosen to mother these miracles, grace deepened by my awareness that only tragedy and poverty could mobilize a love so deep, so radical, that I might be entrusted with these precious 3 a.m. tears.

During the mortal fatigue of one night-turned-morning with the triplets, it hit me how very chosen I had also been the first two times I’d walked this rut into the floorboards, and how very precious had been the tears. SHHH, shhhh, shhh, shhh, shhhh, I’d breathed out the mantra of maternity while I endlessly rocked and walked. Some nights, several minutes after I knew the trusting limpness of a baby asleep against my heart, I’d still softly shhhhh, shhhh, shhhhh. Maybe to quiet myself.

Did you know that every culture around the world makes some approximation of this sound to soothe a crying child? They say it’s an imitation of the sound of the mother’s heart as heard in utero. I love the thought that a mama’s heart is the elusive mother tongue of the world, the language that binds us all together. It was not my heart that first taught its cadence to three of my five babies, but shhhh, shhhh, shhhhh, my heart still lisps every time they get theirs broken. SHHHHH, shhhhh, shhhhh, I breath. There will be other games, other friends, other chances. My mama heart beats to siphon away their pain, to carry what I can, to quiet what I can’t.

When we initiated the process of adopting from Ethiopia, I wrote this unsendable letter to a mother whose love I will spend the rest of my life living up to, the mother whose heart would teach our babies the rhythm of peace.



Dear Mama,
I have been a pregnant woman, have caressed my swelling middle, humming private lullabies to a private baby growing quiet and secret inside of me. I have cherished the fluttery kicks that no one else could feel, and I have scrambled to share the forceful elbow rolls of a baby grown so cramped inside of me that every motion protrudes in tiny, visible waves. It is your face that I see, now, when I dream of my child, your pregnant laughing face. And I wonder. Do you imagine his future? Do you picture her face? Do you picture mine?
Your face beams out from a table of tangled statistics that explode in my heart. 
 Are you the one woman in 14 whose body will break in the final, heroic push to share life? Are you one of the millions whose hunger and pain have set your jaw with the hard hope that your baby (our baby?) must have more? Are you one of the uncountable many whose body will be wracked by malaria or HIV or diphtheria or typhoid or mumps (diseases I dreaded being vaccinated for in gradeschool)?
 Are you going to die? How can I dream of you, with your pregnant, laughing face, and pray for my baby to come home soon? What kind of person am I?

What kind of person are you? I wish I knew. I may not ever know. We are mothers, now, together. I wish I knew if you know that. Do you dream of me? Do you dream of the hope laid out before all of us? Or do you dream of nights watching your baby (our baby?) breathe? You are
my baby's mama. Love hovers just above all of my feelings about you and your pregnant, laughing face.
 My feelings ride lower, closer to the earth. We are mothers together, here on this complicated ground.
 You pay the price; I get the blessing. Is that what adoption is?
 I know that story. I learned it in Sunday school. But I have failed to honor God, again and again. I will not fail our baby. I will mother with all of my heart.

Love,
Amy
I finished that letter nine months to the day before Ayelech lay down her life loving our kids into this world. Over the past five years, I have sent it again and again, carried forward to heaven in every beat of my heart. Last year, God blessed me with two more babies, two babies that would only know my love as a heartbeat before flying home to heaven. The ache of my empty arms sometimes makes it hard even to hold the five impossibly beautiful children that still press in, close, for love. But in my sadness, I have imagined Ayelech, backlit by eternity, rocking my two little ones while I rock three of hers here, in this world where joy still wears barbs on its back and beauty still drags its rough belly through the mess we’ve made in our clumsy efforts at love. I imagine the day when I fly home to heaven; she and I will clutch each other’s hands and, laughing, share stories of children we both have learned to love. Or maybe, we will just fall into each other’s arms and whisper, in the language we both know best, shhh, shhhh, shhhh. Because, maybe the mother tongue is really the heartbeat of God, and we’re all still waiting to be born.

Disney Vacation Part 1: Making Ready for the Rodent

A few weeks ago, when my brother called to offer us the timeshare points that his family wouldn't be able to use before the mid-May expiration, Josh and I gratefully fell to examining our options. I'm thankful to my awesome brother and sweet sister-in-law for two reasons -- first, for the generosity of their gift and second, for the deadline. You see, Josh has been championing the idea of a family vacation since last May when, after months of estrangement and exhaustion in our collective pursuit of my Ph.D., four kind and qualified scholars finally signed The Paper. We all needed time away, he said, to reconnect and regroup. I knew that he was right, but somehow a family vacation seemed.....wasteful. Extravagant. Excessive. Love relies, though, on extravagant, excessive acts -- it's always impractical. It was time, he insisted, to wastefully, extravagantly love our kids in the insular environment of away-ness:) And what could be more extravagant and excessive than Disney World? Which is why, after perusing the timeshare list for less than an hour, we honed in on an Orlando resort and began making strides toward our first family vacation in more than a decade. (Last vacation, we drove baby Olivia to the Indiana shores of Lake Michigan for a long weekend of sand, sun, and sleeplessness.) Without the mid-May deadline, I think we would have procrastinated indefinitely; after all, impractical things are difficult to prioritize. But the 11th hour feel of an impending expiration date ushered me into my comfort zone -- my frenetic, relentless, whirlwind of a comfort zone! I swept into the homestretch of this sprint determined to celebrate my kids with a kind of epic specificity that they wouldn't soon forget.

I started my Equipping phase of this adventure armed with a broad net. After all, a LOT of people have taken families to the Magic Kingdom. I didn't want to re-invent the wheel, just grease it up and stick a few playing cards in the spokes. The morning after my brother's phone call, I saw the sunrise through screen-seared eyes in the wake of a night spent surfing the Disney web (which should, by the way, have it's own little suffix -- .dis or something! It's so sprawling!) My list of add-on extravagances began to take shape; I knew by dawn that I wanted us to wear matching shirts, mouse hats, and fanny packs. I am in no way kidding. The matching shirts bore the dual function of kitsch and practicality. If one of our little ones should slip away from us in the inevitable Disney crowd, my face would not necessarily be the one that a helpful stranger or uniformed worker might seek. BUT, if we were all wearing the same distinctively red, mouse-emblazoned top and Taye were to sift (disoriented by exhaustion) between the hundreds of legs entering the Hall of Presidents. And if, say, he wandered onto the Main Street of Disney proper while, back in the lobby of the Hall of Presidents, Josh and I were baptized by that wave of panic and vigilant clarity that wash over the first moments of realizing that neither parent knows where Taye might be, then it would be useful (hypothetically, of course) for the red shirt to act as a kind of signal. First, for the parent, whose frantic eyes can sweep a room for red in fractions of a life-long second and, then, for the preschooler who, bleary-eyed and afraid, can begin to look up and do the same. Finally, if some well-meaning stranger steps in to help, the home-made shirts can leave no doubt about a relationship that will become altogether clear when my Taye finally falls into my arms, sobbing with mingled fear and relief. All is well.





So, I found a site called CheapestTees and ordered our array of sizes (for less than $3 per shirt!) in crimson, green, and pacific blue and had them sent to my wonderful Mother-in-law's house, where Aunt Judy generously (do you see the theme of generosity peppered across this whole experience?) air brushed silhouettes of Mickey, an elephant, and an orca onto the chests. She also personalized five drawstring backpacks that I added to the order (free, after my shipping discount and additional 20% internet coupon!).



I quickly realized that the personalization element of extravagant love could not be extended to the backs of Mouse Ear Hats without hyper-extravagant expenditure. So, I switched gears, not yet ready to sacrifice the iconic souvenir. I found a set of official Disney ear hats on Ebay for around $3 apiece. They had been abandoned in layaway and were therefore new but deeply discounted.....because they already had names embroidered on the backs....other people's names. I bought them. For one entirely too-short week, we answered to the names of Christine, Joey, Sabnna, Evan, Hunter, Kathisson (that's Katherine in pink overstruck with Addison in yellow), and Paolo.




Here's the weird thing about the "Personalized" ear hats. Each kid read the name on the back, put on the hat smiling, and then called himself or herself by that name --- without asking any questions. Isn't that strange? They just rolled with it! Once we loaded into the van and donned our collective iconography, the kids just called themselves by the names on their hats without pursuing the obvious contradiction. No one said, "Why does this hat say Sabnna instead of Olivia? or Why are you calling me Paolo?" I have no explanation for this anomaly.

I enlisted the fanny packs to solve the two-pronged problem of an unwieldy backpack, annoyingly banging other (already irritable) people in crowded lines, invariably forgotten while stashed in the pick-up bin of a ride that doesn't accommodate luggage. I figured that a fanny pack on every hip, equipped with snacks and a clip-on, BPA-free, collapsible water bottle would solve all manner of problems. It did....some....and it created others. My fanny pack, which ROCKED, (can I just tell you how much I already love this sentence? :) came from the 50 cent bin at my favorite thrift store. I bought some fanny pack attachments on the same rack, but ended up sticking to the basics. First of all, my fanny pack is awesome because it has numerous compartments, some of them secret. Secret compartments are one of my two favorite attributes of anything. (Transformability is the other....but one cannot expect too much from a single fanny pack). My kids' fanny packs, on the other hand, came from the dollar spot at Target (as did a number of the Disney themed car activities that filled their personalized drawstring backpacks). While I am a huge proponent of dollar spots, I also realize that some items often sacrifice quality for the sake of profit margin. Two of the five fanny packs had to be ditched on day 1 of the Disney adventure due to faulty zippers. The others were just a bit too big in the waist for the little ones (although we solved that problem fairly quickly by making them into shoulder strap bags). The snack distribution was very helpful. When the kids would begin to complain of being hungry, I just answered with the glorious sing-song refrain, "Look in your fanny pack!" I did, actually, compose a little song, which I taught to my kids, and we all sang (some of them, I'll acknowledge, participated under duress) -- with choreography. It's more of a chant than a song, really. In case you ever have occasion to don matching family fanny packs, I'll share my lyrics. It goes "Get." (Extend right hand, palm facing forward) "Back!" (Left hand joins right, palm facing forward) "Back up off my fanny pack!" (Hands swivel inward, palms down, to frame fanny pack. Then, to the beat, add a rhythmic hip thrust in the direction of said fanny pack while pumping arms up and down). How in the world could anyone object to such a cool song and dance!? Here's Tari proudly displaying her pack!



A little note on the water bottles: Clip on collapsible water bottles seem like a great idea. And they are....for adults wearing backpacks. Little ones have no great place to clip them, and they spill more than they drink. The combined problem of water bottle size and loose fanny packs make for some untoward....ummm....exposure. On day three, we abandoned most of the kid fanny packs (although I still worked mine) in favor of a snack backpack, clipping a water bottle to the front of the pack. That worked beautifully! (Except, as expected, it did bang into a lot of unhappy people -- who may or may not have been unhappy before being clobbered by our backpack -- and it did get left at the stash bin of the carousel at Sea World, though it was easily retrieved before the final Shamu show.)

During the first days of preparation, I found a Craigslist post that promised a large bin of Disney paraphernalia for $25. I had hoped to pre-purchase souvenirs to pack in the kids drawstring car packs and hand out after each day of fun, but even online prices seemed prohibitive. I love a large mystery bin almost as much as I love secret compartments and transformability, so I responded to the Craigslist post. Crickets. For two weeks, a silence punctuated by imaginary cricket sounds. Then, a week to the day before our trip, the poster responded and said the bin was still available, which I jumped all over. We wound up with plush characters and plastic toys galore for all of the kids, and I still have a half-full bin of breakable or batteries-not-included Disney gear headed to our local thrift store!

So the car activity packs looked like this: Four or five Disney themed books (purchased for 50 cents each at the profusely acknowledged thrift store), a few Disney themed work books from the Dollar Tree, a gallon sized ziplock bag packed with snacks and a smaller ziplock bag marked "Trash" to collect wrappers from the snack bag. (This second bag idea seems good, but it didn't work at all. Ultimately, it just CREATED one more piece of trash to be thrown into the giant collective trash back parked between the two front seats -- which DID work). A pencil bag full of Disney themed art supplies and some Disney antibacterial wipes (also courtesy of Dollar Tree). A plush toy and several smaller plastic character toys from the $25 mystery bin. A journal. I did not include a water bottle because, quite frankly, I didn't want them to drink more than was absolutely necessary for survival. The trip was already going to take more than 14 hours. Bathroom stops have stretched 3 hour trips to nearly 5.....work out the math and you'll find that water bottles might have made Disney utterly impossible. I kept some juice boxes and water bottles in the front seat with me, hoping that the inconvenience would slow them down. It basically worked. We made the trip each way in fairly good time and no one suffered (severe) dehydration in the process. All told, just the FACT of personalized drawstring car activity bags worked like a charm at making each of the kids feel extravagantly loved.




In fact, I think the whole vacation worked to that end! Hopefully, I'll have a chance to write a little about how that played out across our adventure, but, for the moment, suffice it to say that we all piled out of our messy van, splashing Disney excess and laundry across the front room of our house and collapsing into bed with smiles on our faces. All of us. Even Paolo.

Listen to ME!

The Listen to Your Mother show directors asked me a few questions about motherhood to provide a little context for the approaching show. Here are a few of my answers along with the headshot that my husband took. He is the only person alive who can find and record my natural smile. I'll explain why that's Oprah's fault in another post. Why did you audition for Listen To Your Mother? My best friend sent a link to the audition that came through a school announcement, urging me to submit something. That’s the reason I applied in pragmatic terms; I love my friend, and I thought it sounded doable. More to the point, though, I think I applied because my failures are so glaringly visible (messy home, short tempers, fighting kids, etc.) and the parts of my life that shine never get noticed (wound dressing, couch cuddling, the dramatic interpretation of children’s classics, etc.). I wanted to shine. What does your day-to-day life look like? I’m trying to think of the elements of every day that are consistent, since our schedule at home whiplashes from frantic to freewheeling. Here are some constants. My youngest always wakes me with a whispered request to play the iPad for an hour before everyone else gets up. I send him off to a quiet room, while I drag myself to the coffee maker and start pulling together breakfast. What follows is either a mad dash to find enough reasonably matched shoes to cover all of our mismatched socks so that we can make it to a homeschool co-op on time OR an hour of reading to my four-year-olds while the big kids grudgingly tackle math. Then, the little guys watch Bill Nye (or something), while I sneak in a shower, and we head out for an afternoon adventure or hunker down with projects and a family book. The above elements are either peppered with music and laughter or crying and screaming, variables that color everything in between. What is the best mothering advice you’ve ever received? “Nobody’s walking around high school with her umbilical cord still attached.” That was my pediatrician’s response to my concern over three-week-old Olivia’s scabby stump, a response that eventually morphed into my mothering mantra. It turns out my diligent efforts to care for her first ever wound by bathing it daily in alcohol had actually prolonged its adhesion. I had pickled it. When our doctor announced her prognosis, I gained a perspective that I’ve resurrected again and again, reminding myself to step back, worry less, and stop interfering. When potty training hit, and poop was predictably everywhere it shouldn’t be and never where it should, I muttered, “Nobody walks around high school pooping her pants.” And when my two-year-old seemed light years away from spontaneously weaning, I chanted, “Nobody walks around high school sucking on her mama’s…” You get the idea. Stuff usually works out, and meddling just makes it take longer. What is the best mothering advice you’ve ever given? Play to your strengths. Too many of us beat ourselves up for not being someone else. I collapse under the weight of dishes and laundry precisely BECAUSE other mothers keep house so painlessly and organically. Crafts make me want to puke. I can’t stand watching my kids work a puzzle; it stresses me out! As long as I keep my eyes firmly focused on the gifts I lack, I run around failing at those things that make me great. And I am great! Great at reading aloud to my kids. Great at telling stories. Great at imagining and embarking on adventures. Great at laughing with my kids. Great at dining room dancing. I could go on and on! And so could every mother on the planet. Every mother is singularly magnificent, and so is every child. I believe that God chose me for my children (on purpose!) BECAUSE of who I am, not IN SPITE of who I am. When I try to become my friends, I fail at being exactly the mother that I was created to be. What is the greatest impact motherhood has had on your life so far? Nothing humbles like motherhood. Not even middle school. My strongest weaknesses peer back at me through the magnifying mirror of my kids’ faces. My deepest fears coalesce around their vulnerabilities. My heart, a fickle little organ I spent so many years training to be tough, stretches and snaps almost every time I stop hurrying long enough to stare at them. I am sunk! I’ve lived a few epic adventures, but only motherhood has taught me to cling, white-knuckled, to God’s grace, and only my kids have made me perfectly certain that nothing’s more powerful than LOVE. What songs are on your favorite Netflix cue? My Netflix queue looks like a theme-based unit study. It’s very homeschool-cool, situated around subject-specific biographies and documentaries. My kids will gripe to their therapists about Mama’s version of “movie night.” We do, at least, serve popcorn! Be sure to purchase tickets soon, if you're planning to attend. I'm told they're going fast!

Oh, Yes! We Did Disney!

As of 1:20a.m. this morning, the surprise vacation is officially over. And what a vacation it was! I look forward to sharing the highlights here in the coming days. Until then, enjoy your family! We are enjoying ours!

HomeSchool Cool

I have posted ad nauseum about our oscillation from homeschool to public school and back to homeschool, covering the attendant pitfalls of HSW (HomeSchool Weird)ness. I have not, though, justly balanced the weird factor with the particular brand of wonderful that can only be designated HomeSchool Cool (HSC!), a category of awesomeness that we, as a family, trip into from time to time. Consider, for example, an afternoon misadventure at a local park, a local park with no available restrooms. Taye, of course, had a full bladder immediately upon noticing the lack of facilities, so I ushered him to the back of our minivan where, with all the discretion a four-year-old can muster, he dropped trow and began to take care of business. After he had finished, he pointed proudly to the puddle now trickling toward the parking lot's low point and announced, "I made BRAZIL!!!! Look, Mom, I pottied Brazil!" That, my friends, is HSC! Choosing THE BEST audiobook as your contribution to the Latin, Science, and Logic Club Christmas Gift Exchange -- definitely HSC. Mastering the steps at our annual, tri-county, homeschool square dance --- HSC! Lest you conflate HSC with HSW (a common misconception), please remember that HSW eventually boils down to the slippery slope of parental intensity that I still scramble to avoid -- a twitchy, self-important, ego-driven focus on performance instead of process -- a drive to measure up that entirely eclipses the joy of education. (Again, while this imbalance clearly pervades public school as well, the close quarters of family/school life make HSW a pitfall that can shake loose some anchor points of our most crucial relationships -- waters I am not proud to have tested). HSC, on the other hand, unabashedly celebrates the peculiarities of personality and a passion for learning that sometimes get muffled by the fast-flowing current of mainstream culture. And if HSC were a range of mountains, then my Olivia enjoyed her moment on Everest's peak this past weekend. Have you ever seen videos of tween girls in line for Bieber tickets, all giddy and blurry, moving too fast even for digital shutter speeds? Lock in on that image. Now, replace Justin Bieber with Dr. Christopher Perrin of Classical Academic Press, and superimpose my daughter's face on the effervescent preteen girl. Voila! My daughter's 15 minutes in the HSC spotlight. For the past two years, we have been using Classical Academic Press's Latin curricula, starting last year with Song School Latin and leaping forward to Latin For Children in the Fall of 2012. In order to get the most out of the program (and take some of the pronunciation pressure off of their grossly inadequate mother-teacher), we purchased the whole LFC package with video clips included. And twice a month we meet with a handful of other friends who join us in watching the videos and reviewing vocabulary. This all sounds rather benign and unrelated to our brush with fame unless you know that Dr. Perrin appears in every video segment, first as grammar instructor and often in goofy segments as comic relief (I'll be honest, the comic part is definitely a relief! The grammar drills are tough on this middle-aged mind!). When Olivia learned that Dr. Perrin -- in the flesh -- would be at this year's homeschool convention, she agreed to join me for a day out together, provided I would take her picture with Perrin should they happen to meet. And they did. And I did. Honestly, I'm not sure who felt more HSC last Friday, my daughter or Dr. Perrin. He was flexing his Latin declensions for a couple of maternal admirers when Olivia and I politely imposed upon him for an autograph and photo op. Perrin graciously wrote a couple of sentences in my daughter's book and posed for the above picture, but not without a little bit of classical swagger! I'm not sure what other venue carves out such a high-profile niche for someone with a Ph.D. in what? Latin, maybe? or Classical Studies? I doubt the tween crowd regularly swoons. So my daughter gets to spend a week as Queen of the Co-op (HSC at its finest) and Dr. Perrin gets an anecdote for his dinner table -- a magister honored by his loyal discipula. What could be more HomeSchool Cool than that!?

Listen to Your Mother!

And I get to be a part of it! I'm honored to be sharing my story at the Indianapolis Listen to Your Mother show on May 2nd!

Santa -- at Warp Speed

This year's trip to the North Pole was kind of a last minute decision. On our way home for a church gathering, we swung by the mall to see if the elves were still in operation for the evening. Success! No lines, no tears, no traumatized kids or Clauses. I call that a very merry Christmas.

Thoughts about our Free-schooled family

Hi, everyone.
My name is Amy.
I used to have a blog at this address:)
Perhaps you'll forgive my long absence if you know that I've taken to homeschooling my kids this year. And that's why I'm sitting here musing on my blog again after all of this time -- to parse out a few of my pedagogical ideas, and to share the parselings with the masses:)

Here are the parselings (garnish for an idea feast:):

First, I want to be clear (primarily with myself) that I am not called to homeschool. Actually, I'm not called by God to much of anything. I'm commanded to love, a command bolstered by careful instruction and the impeccable example of an incarnate Christ. I'm gifted with certain inclinations, like reading and singing and talking about ideas. Each time I offer those gifts to God, He uses them to His purposes and my delight. From time to time, He taps me -- in His grace -- to love specific people in specific ways as opportunities arise. Sometimes He taps, and I turn away (and He goes on loving me). Sometimes He taps, and I listen and act and find myself swallowed up by the Great Love passing through me. Sometimes, I'm absolutely sure, He taps, and I'm so mired in outside noise and internal narrative that I miss the tap altogether. Taps are not callings, though. They are just rare moments of wakefulness in my spiritually sluggish days. (I love them.) A calling seems more like a point-by-point job description, and I'm just so doubtful about the prospect of such particular guidance in a faith denoting so much freedom (by virtue of the Cross).

Don't misunderstand me -- the Command is BIG. And I long to live wide-eyed so that I don't pass by anyone without loving. I want to live His command, perpetually. Instead, I seem to sleepwalk from tap to tap, perceiving such a thin fragment of all that He shares with me of His Love.

So, that lets me off the hook. Sending my kids to public school would not be a sin, or a breach of my life's called purpose. In fact, as I wrote about once, it better resembles, in many ways, a visceral exemplification of the Command.

On the other hand, I missed the reading. And I guess, in many ways, it comes down to that. During breaks, we read around 4 hours every day -- together -- and the kids read amply on their own. During school months, our reading sessions were sparse and sporadic. Something about sitting alongside one another looking at life through a common lens helps us see better eye to eye. I'm not sure why, exactly. It's sort of like existential experimentation -- testing life choices through fictional characters, and evaluating outcomes without any threat of judgement. And I do voices:) [In fact, a couple of years ago, when I was deep into The Secret Garden -- rich with all manner of British accents, from classic to cockney -- my husband pulled me aside after breakfast one Saturday with a weird, worried expression on his face. "You did something really weird last night," he stammered, looking more than a little concerned. "What?!" I asked, wondering what could possibly be weird after 8 years of sharing a bed with my crazy, up all night, hijinx, unruffled. "You talked in your sleep," he said. "That's not so weird." After all, I talk in my sleep whenever I'm worried, scared, or medicated -- which accounts for a good portion of our married life:) "You talked in your sleep," he clarified, "In a British accent. It really freaked me out." Ahhh, the many unlookedfor applications of my theater major in action!]

So we're reading, again. I like that. And I'm finally working to memorize my (stinking) multiplication tables, along with my children. And it turns out we all love history and science, if you want to call them that. Mostly, we read....together.

[Last night, Olivia talked in her sleep. More specifically, when I went in to wake her up this morning, she was muttering and crying -- actual tears -- while sleeping. I woke her, and she gasped, "Oh, mama, I had the worst dream!" and curled into my arms. "Can I tell you about it?" she asked. "Of course," I replied (of course). "I dreamed I went back to public school." Okay, so at this point, I'm beginning to formulate my application to return to public school immediately, because this nightmare is sounding very Home School Weird -- see previous posts for clarification regarding HSW. "I went back to public school, " she continued, "And the kids were mean and the teacher was mean, and I handled all of that. But then, they started a history lesson that somehow came around to Archimedes, and I just really started missing homeschool." So that's a good reason to cry -- just missing our Archimedes reading, and our laughter at his bare-bottomed excitement over buouancy, and his crazy geometric tombstone. Archimedes is a good reason to cry. I said, "Well, as of right now, your dad and I have planned to work together again next year doing our school here at home, which means there's nothing here to miss, and everything's okay. It was only a dream." I THOUGHT.....seriously, Olivia. There's no reason to worry even if we decided otherwise. There's no way Archimedes would come up in a public school history lesson.....doesn't my thinking self sound self-righteous and cynical! Now you know why I miss so many taps! It's good that, nearing forty, I'm finally getting a handle on the gap between my thinking self and my speaking self! Apparently, I'm not yet sure where my blogging self fits:)]

I realize, in some ways, that I'm risking everything -- a fact that alternately encourages me (as a risk-lover) and strikes me with motherguilt like a parasite sucking on my soul. I know that Josiah would do well with the order in a public school classroom. It's only Olivia and I who love this learning like buckshot. But he's getting along, and we are reading. In fact, he's turned out to be the most voracious book hound among us, sniffing for biographies among his favorite fare.

As to the little three -- I plan/have planned to start a kind of formal preschool-at-home with them next fall. In the meantime, they're absorbing everything the six of us do together all day with the breathtaking speed at which three three-year-old minds absorb everything. They continue to homeschool me.

I doubt this site will become a repository of reading lists and curriculum reviews anytime soon. I'm still figuring out how to feed them and bathe them while teaching them. I'm not yet aiming to chronicle them. I am, however, enjoying this leg of the journey and the freedom it affords us. And that's really the crux of this uncalled tap-life. Grace, here, means freedom. [My dad once told me, on a day when I was particularly frozen in the post-graduation paralysis of early adulthood, that I was worrying around the edges of God's grace like it was a tent. Like I thought that if I stepped too far in any direction, I would move outside the shelter and into the torrents all around us. He was right (of course). "I tend to think God's will is more like an umbrella than a tent, because of the cross. You have to carry it and open it, but it travels where you do." Whether or not you agree with my dad (and it's always wise to agree with him -- knowing that 20 years ago would have made adolescence less volatile, wouldn't it?), clearly I come by my Uncalled, Always Tapped philosophy honestly!]

That's why I'm calling us free-schooled this year. Not because it's free. The homeschool situation has done nothing to ameliorate my book-thrifting addiction! Because I'm resting on the freedom of grace in making and carrying out this risky decision. I'm clutching my umbrella, and heading, white-knuckled, into the rain.

Every Song a Swan Song

When I was between the ages of 17 and 23, I was a songwriter. Political. Emotional. Generally rhyming. My songs were limited to melodic formulations that fit the handful of chords I could play on the guitar and piano (a number which has dwindled rather than growing through ensuing years). Let me dwell a minute on the love songs (and all of them were love songs, to some degree....if vengefully, DiFrancishly so). For years (even after we were married), Josh seemed bothered by the fact that he was never the subject of one of my love songs (though, with their limited musical value and questionable appeal, he should have thanked me, daily:). One day, in explaining it to him (and that is how most of my epiphanies come, WHILE I'm voicing an explanation, not before), I exclaimed (probably with great force) "I only write love songs for people after the love is dead or the people have left me!"

It's true, insofar as I can remember my love songs.

My last post cost me like a love song! AND, it seems to have been a eulogy, as well! Ever since I posted the tangle of confusion that surrounds my submission to food (which seems absurd, but couldn't be more palpable), I have....been.......REMARKABLY.....freer! I've faced down the newly named spectres (don't ask me why I spell that word Britishly -- I just do, I always do), and paid them due homage like past loves.....

What an interesting change!

I love it (though not enough, yet, to write a song about it:)


(Thank you to all of you who offered your friendship in kind thoughts and prayers. I have no doubt that God, whose prompting led to the post, is the catalyst for this freedom, and I know how he works through our lovers, far and near. I appreciate you ---- sincerely).

Tari's Questions

Over the past several weeks, Tarikwa has taken to presenting me with questions. Not her usual peppering of sweet, thoughtful, helpful inquiries, or even those of the repetetive, insistent variety (for which she has a particular knack). These are new. These questions, bald as they are, seem oddly rhetorical -- by that I mean conversationally strategic, designed to engage me in adultish back-and-forth that her (now 3-year-old!) toddler mind must somehow crave. (I remember slipping into my parents' room one night with just such an agenda, determined to have a conversation of the ilk I imagined them having together and with other grown-ups. When they asked what, specifically, I wanted to talk about, all I could come up with was one word......"Squirrels." I'm not sure why). Tari is infinitely more creative than I was at her age. She asks, "What are hands for?" and "What is a mouth for?" or "Why is pizza?" Normally, I slip her a portion of the "honest and enough" brand that has carried me through some awkward parenting moments (and ushered me into others!). Hands are for playing holding and patting. Mouths are for talking and tasting. Pizza is.....dinner? Two nights ago, she caught me dozing and splashed the frigid bucket full of this one in my face: "Mama, why do you eat?" Honest. Enough. My reasonable truths -- nutrition, enjoyment, subsistence -- seemed altogether dishonest and insufficient. I don't eat for those reasons. I did once (maybe, though I can't remember when), but I don't.

How should I answer my little one, though? The answers came, fast and hard, but none of them utterable. "Mama eats because she's scared, honey." "Because I'm afraid of getting sucked under by the insensible tow of this life at home and need to be reminded that I still have volition." "Because I need a secret to be in charge of." "There's some chemical endorphine explanation that keeps me coming back for more....in a word: self medication." "Because if I eat and eat then the offending food will be out of my house and will no longer exercise control over my every thought by its very presence." (And you should see the insatiability of my efforts to this end! I astonish myself. My son has a friend whose allergies to gluten and dairy make snack selection a chore. When he wanted to invite his friend to a birthday party, Josiah said: "Tyson can't eat glutton," yep. He said glutton instead of gluten. "So we have to buy special food. I have seen brownie mix at the store that said Glutton Free Brownies on the box, so maybe we could buy those!" Dear sweet Josiah, if only global innovation and enterprise could yield a glutton free brownie. But.....alas.....) "Revenge." (Now I'm back to the answers that common sense forbids me from offering to my three year old, but her wide eyes compel me to face.) "I find self-destruction more accessible than self-discipline." "Because I am unlovely and, thus (love this insidious illogical lie?) unworthy of love."

Honest?

Enough?

I remember being ten and writing out this phrase on a note card, "Your body is God's temple, keep it thin," and pasting copies of that note card at the foot of my bed and on my vanity (nice) mirror. I can't remember a time when I didn't exchange that truth for a lie.

And now, my beautiful daughters.....one innocent and one increasinly desparate.....ask, "Mama, why do you eat?" And I have to face the answers or face the consequences.

Honest.

Enough.

Do I have a Right To Homeschool my Children?

I love my children. Let's begin there. I don't always love them well (though I always want to), but I love them fully. For the past ten years, I have filtered all of my parenting choices thorugh the sieve of my ultimate goals: that I should contribute in every way possible to my children loving God and loving others. Because I love them, I steer them toward love -- love that costs. Love for enemies. Love for difficult people (and sometimes I know I am one of the difficult people).
Preschool seemed a natural choice. Olivia was reading some and writing pretty proficiently by the time she was 3, and gravitated toward learning new things in the ravenous, touching way that all three year olds do. I studied, visited, popped in on, and otherwise scoured all of the preschools in our community during the course of her second year until I found a montessori-based Christian preschool that didn't rock our financial world. I stood in line (in alternate shifts with my mother, who stood in my stead while I went home to nurse my baby Josiah) from 4 until 8 in the morning --- blizzard notwithstanding! -- to enroll her. She screamed every morning for 9 months, sometimes only leaving the car after the teacher peeled her arms from around my neck. She couldn't start a zipper. She wanted to peek in on other kids' projects during rug time. So many ways to fail. My beautiful, social, brilliant baby girl was a Montessori flop (and, by extension, so was her mama).
When I informed her teacher that I wasn't reenroling her for pre-k, she warned me of the social deficit she would face in coming years. She stayed home with me the following fall, and we preschooled at home three mornings a week, with field trips every Thursday. (When my big kids were still little kids, they told their dad that they knew mama loved them because of field trip Thursdays === we really had a blast). The spring before kindergarten, she was reading well, writing well, able to understand basic computation, and socially amazing. I chose one of the few half-day kindergarten programs in town because I thought I could continue with some homeschooling after she got out of school mid-morning, in case school didn't challenge her enough. It didn't, and I didn't. During the day, she often got assigned to struggling learners as a kind of peer tutor, and the teacher remained unaware of the extent of Olivia's abilities for most of the year. I, having outsourced my daughter's education and intimidated by the fact that I taught her to write using the wrong alphabet script (so many ways to fail!), left schooling to school and retained only field trip Thursdays.
After much prayer, I decided that public school (which was also the catalyst for Sunday night trauma during the entire year ---- tears, tears, tears) was out unless she was chosen to attend a magnet school that promised project-based learning and multi-leveled, technology-rich learning environments. We didn't get chosen, so I amassed a curriculum that seemed to suit us, and threw my hat into the homeschooling ring. Then her name was pulled from a waiting list -- we accepted. Then we were chosen to parent infant triplets. So it all seemed like a gift, this school, these five, this year of hanging on together with professionals educating Olivia, encouraging her to grow and learn. Our teacher was sick --- on and off for nearly six of the nine month school year. They never had enough notice to call in a certified teacher, and I have a hard time putting my finger on anything she learned during first grade --- apart from what we learned as a family as we were newly grown.
But Josiah. Josiah didn't hate preschool. He struggles with some schoolish skills, and his teacher was solid, encouraging, playful, and sweet. So we headed toward his Kindergarten year optimistically. The babies had grown enough that Grandma could watch them one morning each week while I volunteered in the kindergarten and second grade classrooms. Remember, my goal for my kids was never to be as smart as they could become. Homeschool would have seemed an easy answer then. My parenting goal was to support them as they learned to love God and others --- especially the people who were difficult to love. Where else can you find such a high concentration of difficult to love people upon whom we could exercise love skills besides public school?
But have I equipped them to love difficult people (and aren't I often difficult? and aren't they?)? Second grade was an academic wash, but Olivia led her class in a campaign to put a well in Africa, a successful effort for which she openly (and rightly) gives God all the credit. Kindergarten inspired my son to offer his "personal best" every time. (We, gratefully, enjoyed the best teacher in the district for his inaugural year of public school.) Helping my children see the pathway to love with bullies, clubs, inclusions, exclusions, angry friends, and bad choices sent us to the Word and to prayer (two excellent places to head with your children). We got to observe, first hand, prayers answered as ways to love the people who hurt us became more apparent. But....it....has.....been......hard. And this year, I have felt extremely nigh unto a breaking point! My daughter confesses, every day, her shortcomings for at least 20 minutes on the ride home from school. She loses sleep to worry. She has stumbled upon filth during online research, despite the school's copious filters. She and her friends traded thigh measurements to see where they "fit." Each day I feel like I spend the entire evening wiping crap from her face and her heart with a gentle cloth and filling her tiny bucket to send her into tomorrow's thirsty, blazing world.

But she isn't mine. And we have so much water here. And the world is so thirsty. SO thirsty. How can I justify a family water party when there are so many parched babies in public school classrooms.....with no water....anywhere. And the call of the kingdom is higher than the call of maternity (right?). Though they are not at odds, when the choice stands between serving His priorities for His family or my priorities for mine....well, there doesn't seem to be a choice. (That verse about hating mother, father, children, etc. as prerequisite fitness for Kingdom service comes to mind). Furthermore, they are not my children. They are His. And children drink fresh, clean water because my little ones share (literally and figuratively), every day. That's why they often come home so empty.....and so parched. (And perhaps the sacrifice to love people, face up -- not just far away, is their inheritance.)

But I want to bring them home, in my heart. To let them learn; learning and teaching alongside them.

How can I when Jochabed and Hannah go before me? Consider Moses and Samuel. First Moses: to protect her second son from the scourge of persecution, Jochabed places him in a river in a basket in God's hands. Miriam (his big sister) follows him until Pharaoh's daughter pulls him from the river, and at Miriam's suggestion, allows him to be nursed by Jochabed and returned to her upon his weaning (which, according to Hebrew custom would have been around 3 years old). Then comes, what I consider one of the most heart-rending faith leaps imaginable (made more tangible to me in the three children entrusted to my care by another): Jochabed returns him to the palace. Knowing that he will be raised to worship idols, to participate in sacrifices and oracles and palace privilege built on the broken bodies of slaves --- of her own family --- she turns him, again, over to the care of God. Surely, if the voice of God can make its way through the clamour of Pharaoh's palace, it can pierce the din of public education.

Right?

What about Hannah? Persecuted by her husband's other wife and by the whole of Jewish society for her childlessness, Hannah prays for a child whom she promises to give back to the Lord, in his service. Eli accuses her of drunkenness as she prays. When she confesses her heart, he prays for God's blessing., and so enters Samuel. When Samuel is weaned (again, presumably around three), she returns him to the temple for a lifetime of service, seeing him thereafter only once a year during a ritual visit and to bestow upon Samuel a coat into which she wove a twelve months of loving handiwork. But to whom did she entrust her toddler? Certainly not to Eli, whose prior forays into parenting yielded two of the most heinous exploiters of the priesthood in history. Hopni and Phinneas caroused with worshipers in the temple court, ate the fat off the sacrifices, and generally desecrated and mocked the holy things of God -- with no apparent reproof from Eli, whose only appearances in scripture paint him as mostly gluttonous, lazy, and short-tempered. She turned him over to the care of her God, who raised him into a prophet and lover of God and God's people. Surely, if God's voice can call out to Samuel over the cacophony of carousing and neglect, then He can handle public school.

And the gift to my kids of faith in a God that can stand and heal and fill and feed, again and again --- doesn't that outweigh my instruction and their insulation? Doesn't it?
But I long to bring them home. Just for a rest. To learn and drink and go strong. But when will it be enough? And how many will succumb to thirst in the meantime?

(The encouraging points in Hannah's and Jochabed's story, and they are many, bolster up my enjoyment of the early years I share at home with my kids. Apparently, the first years, the nursing years, lay a foundation. And maybe they teach a love upon which God can reach through years of mess to build. Hopefully I haven't screwed that one up too much!)

Do the wounds our children receive in loving have greater purpose? They did for Mary's son. When it looked like the brutality of the world stole Him away --- there were divine arrangements being made for LOVE and eternal HOPE. But my children aren't Jesus, right? (Right!) But they have been chosen. And so have the 27 others in their public school classrooms. They just may not know it yet. And what if no one ever shows them --- shows them that they have been chosen to be loved?

Can anyone (please!) come up with an argument for homeschooling that is more sound?

Santastic

Although Tarikwa refused, tenaciously, to smile, and though Taye would only get as close as Olivia's lap, I'd say this year's trip to the mall North Pole was a success. It certainly turned out a far....cry....better than last year!

Merry Christmas! We are all healthy and growing this year -- in more ways than we ever thought possible. I hope the same for all of you.

An Adoption Story

I ran across this video through another friend's blog and thought I'd share it with you.

God Story: The Howerton Family from ROCKHARBOR on Vimeo.

Did you enjoy it? So did I!

Three's a crowd! Five's a pack! Seven's a Family!

Today, we hit the park after picking up O and Jo. (These nicknames only apply to our pickup line chant. We don't call them O and Jo -- we just yell it out gleefully while we wait for teachers to march them to the car line:) A baby girl at the park (maybe 16 or 18 months old) took an interest in Girum, Tarikwa, and Taye, alternately. Tarikwa has a funny ambivalence about small kids outside of her triad. She's VERY nurturing. Very small babies, cousins, or children that seem unincluded get her full onslaught of empathetic tenderness. Other kids, though -- big kids or kids unfortunate enough to want a toy that Tarikwa has in her possession -- see a different side of sweet Tari...a silent, square-shouldered, eyes-averted tenacity that defies description. The little girl at the park was dancing on the line between compelling sweetness or stoic territorialism until Tarikwa played a little peekabo, and softened when it made the park baby laugh. I commented on their sweet interaction, "I think that little girl really likes playing with you Tarikwa." Tari smiled and then looked at me, confused for a moment, before asking, "Mama, where's her brothers and sisters?" It really struck me how much Tari's universe coalesces around her place in a constellation of family. Right now, she has only a limited understading of how intricate and peopled her constellation is. I'm just so grateful to be a part of it.

Our Life is a Fairy Tale....(Guess which one!)

The other day, I grew frustrated with my two-year-old triplets. (I'm not sure why, but that sentence makes me laugh:) I'm not sure which scheme they were executing at the time of my frustration --- and they certainly know how to execute a scheme --- but it was something on the back porch, involving all three of them. Here's the part I'll never forget: After halting whatever danger may have attended their mischief, I launched into a moderate, but no doubt intense, lecture. (Let me characterize my toddler lectures, for clarity: pursed eyebrows, voice louder than normal -- though not generally a yell --, firm, punctuated hand gestures, etc.) Then, I turned away, and started to walk out into the yard. I turned back when I didn't hear six feet following me. They were all standing stock still with wide eyes and startled expressions. They, Taye looked over at Girum and Tari, began to stomp, slowly, with arms and legs stiff, wrinkled his eyebrows and said in a growly voice, "Feee, Fie, Fo, Fum...."

The other two stared back, and looked, then, at one another -- like they were agreeing with his assessment.

I cracked up.

It's good I can laugh at myself, because I never seem to run out of material!

Two Days of Famiversary Fun

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Love and Support, Josh style

Years (and years....and years) ago, I stared down the barrel of the biggest exam of my life. Pass it, and I would move on to candidacy toward my Ph.D. in English Literature. Fail, and the years (and years...and years) of coursework would fizzle into a post-MA trail of trials behind me, cheapening a million family sacrifices that had carried me so far. [One semester, when my work load was huge and Olivia (then just under a year) wanted no one but Mama, I often played on the floor with our baby while Josh read Jane Austen aloud (with character voices!) from the couch.] My amazing husband took my exam day off of work to care for our then toddler and baby, Olivia and Josiah. I woke up from a fitful sleep, dressed in "appropriate" clothes and a pair of shoes that I purchased for the occasion just because they said "Faulkner" on the sole. (Clearly, I was grasping for any edge I could get my shaky white knuckles around.) Just before I headed out the door, Josh stopped me, sat me down, and pushed play on our VCR. And this is what I watched:



Then, I walked out the front door while my husband and two babies clapped, slowly at first and then more quickly....until my car was out of sight. SO, as I crawl toward defending this dissertation, I run up against countless uninspired moments. Each meeting with my advisor becomes more critical, and I find my husband tagging inspirational speeches in his spare time...often. Tonight, he found one that I really enjoyed.



You can watch the original if you like, but I'm sold on the remake!




Anyway, if he doesn't have me screen Randy Pausch's entire last lecture (which he just might), I'd say the Miracle speech is an excellent contender for parting words before my next long walk to the car.

Father's Day Bonus

Some of my best friends moved away. This is sad. Their whole family still brings me such joy from so far away. This is wonderful. Check out my friend (and former bandmate!:) Scott and their FANTASTIC son Miles rockin out in their ultra-popular garage band! You'll be so glad you did.






P.S. The gorgeous woman in white as the audience gets panned (you know the one I mean!) is my friend Mary, and although I never caught a glimpse of their sweet Annalee, I smile just thinking of her and the hours we have all spent playing together. Thank you, Mary, for the lifetime of friendship that we've shared in a few short years.