Confessions – Page 17 – The UnderToad

How to Make Your Child Obey (Part 2)

You are always exactly a week away from heaven, or a week away from hell. If you stick to your guns and hold your boundaries, blissful cooperation is right around the corner. But if you give up at day three all of your effort will be declared officially worthless. And the kids win.

Apparently this is a lesson I supposedly received more than one time while working at the wilderness camp. John swears he said it to us as our trainer, and repeated it again throughout his private tutoring sessions with me (aka: dating). Somehow, like most of that year of my life, such important nuggets of wisdom all seem like a bit of a blur.

This is what child-inflicted stress can do to a person, people.

This is why we continue to have more children after the first two nearly killed us.

Having forgotten this nugget, I had been recently toying with the idea of implementing some creativity into my discipline style. Before I go on, Continue reading “How to Make Your Child Obey (Part 2)” →

Confessions, Eliott

How To Make Your Child Obey (Part 1)

I know every single woman on Earth has sworn she would not grow up to be like her mother and probably most of us have eaten those words in one form or another. The lucky few of us who are no longer blind to how awesome our mothers actually were all along, don’t try to hide it.

A couple retorts that were pretty regular in my house were things like, “I’m the Mommy, that’s why,” (she even had a cross-stitched shrine to herself with this saying hanging in the laundry room), “Wait until your father gets home,” (what non-single mother on Earth didn’t use this one I ask you), and the ever-classic, “Who said life is supposed to be fair?”

Okay. So maybe I internally rolled my eyes at these when I was young. I’m sure my own children will one day be doing the same thing. Continue reading “How To Make Your Child Obey (Part 1)” →

Carter, Confessions, Eliott

Hooray, Bubble Weather!

Even in North Carolina, where it is currently seventy-five degrees the day before St. Patrick’s Day, the winters seem long to me. I will choose too-hot over too-cold any day, despite the argument that you can always put more on but there’s only so much…blah, blah, blah. Somehow, my body tends to adjust more quickly and more readily to the heat than the cold.

Plus, I like sunshine. Call me crazy.

Last October, almost as my liturgical goodbye, I found a 90% Off Summer Sale at Rite-Aid and cleared the shelves of bubbles.

Continue reading “Hooray, Bubble Weather!” →

Confessions

How to Recover from “Spring Forward”

I think I can safely say that this is the first year in, perhaps my entire life, that I’ve looked forward to, and then celebrated, setting my clocks an hour ahead. This is most likely due to the fact that, in North Carolina anyway, the average temperature for the past eight weeks has been around 61 degrees. In anticipation of high nineties, mosquitoes, and likely a drought, come July, I have been trying to make the most of our outdoor time while it is ripe.

Unfortunately, I am not currently a morning person.

Combine the weather with a few other timely circumstances and what I’ve discovered is the 5-step recipe to preparation for, and a quick recovery from Springing Forward. I will share the following, which is probably advice I should have shared a few months ago. Always next year…

Spend the entire winter sleeping until at least ten minutes after your children are awake. No matter what schedule my children are on, the encroaching longer days means there are at least two weeks where the sun is up an entire hour earlier than normal. Despite the white noise machines and black out shades, somehow both of their little pre-pubescent bodies are acutely solar-equipped. After a glorious winter of nightly hibernating until at least 8 o’clock every morning, I have been cursed by the sun to sudden and unrelenting 6:45am wake-up calls. On the day where 6:45 magically becomes 7:45, I actually tricked myself into believing the children were sleeping in again.
Contract a stomach virus within 48 hours of the global sixty minute shift. Sleep all day, except for three twenty minute breaks to shuffle around the house looking for some couch or bed that has not yet been sweated out or drooled in. Do not eat anything for at least 24 hours. It will not matter what time those first few rays of headache free sunlight start to pour in. Operate according to hunger and thirst, rather than the clock.
Take up a new outdoor activity with people you actually enjoy, who also have full-time jobs. After spending a couple weeks or months communicating only with children (or co-workers who act like children) make plans for a new social hobby that includes cool people and time spent outside. When the only time of day for getting together to ride bikes or go for a run is after 5pm, that extra hour of daylight suddenly feels like a gift. (I guess if you weren’t the active type, you could substitute a drinking club on a rooftop bar for this one. As long as the activity must take place outside and is comprised of cool people only, it doesn’t really matter what it is.)
Make a commitment to something early on the Sunday morning after the switch, but be sure to schedule it early enough that you don’t realize which Sunday you committed to until it is too late. Perhaps this is serving soup downtown, or walking in an early morning 5K. Maybe this is coffee duty at church. Again, it doesn’t really matter, as long as it is something you can’t wriggle out of at 10pm the Saturday before.
Re-embrace the mid-day nap. This is one I obviously didn’t need to implement in my day, and let me tell you, the habit has come in nicely for overcoming the 2pm Spring Forward slump. No guilt here for spending my Selection Sunday passed out on the couch while birds chirped in the 65 degree Eden that was my backyard. Why? Because, I take a nap at least three days a week. It is something I have unconsciously blocked out time for in my life so that my mind can also rest while my body does. It turns out, guilt and anxiety are two of the most common factors affecting poor sleep, so the sooner you can train yourself to let go of one or both, the sooner you can start feeling better about listening to your body, something Oprah and your hot yoga instructor have been preaching for years.

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Confessions, Eliott

Reading Before Bedtime

“Mommy, can you come upstairs and talk about my day?”

This is Eliott’s new favorite thing to do. John does the bed and bath routine every single night now, because by five o’clock, I really need to punch out of mommy duty for the day. But just before she’s settled in and the lights are out, she comes to the top of the stairs and asks this question. Every single night, as if I have a choice. We’ve been doing it for several months now, and though I’m wise to the fact that it is a five-year old plot to stay up a little bit later at night, at the same time, I will keep it going as long as I possibly can. Obviously. When she doesn’t want to go to bed, the girl divulges secrets like I’m the diary she doesn’t know how to write in yet.

The other night, after two days of sickness (thus, no pre-bed snuggle time with mommy) I finally had to cut her off and tell her it was time for me to go downstairs.

Continue reading “Reading Before Bedtime” →

Confessions

Popularity Contest

Who said I was above being nominated for Prom Queen? Just because it never happened, doesn’t mean it wasn’t a secret desire.

You might notice the shiny new pink button to the right. Click it. Find The UnderToad (waaay at the bottom of the list) and vote. You can do this once a day for the next ten days. It is a silly little contest with no apparent prize, besides Internet fame. Shameless plug for votes here people, but to be honest, I’d just like to finish in the top three. (Think I can get 1,000 votes?)

I am a little late in the entry so there are only ten days left. I think it would be awesome for The UnderToad to make a tortoise rocket-jet pack finish and cause all ten of the top blogs to go, “What the–? Where’d this come from?!”

So will you tell your friends?

Confessions

Oh You, Crazy Internet, You

So I’m not really sure how to begin this post. I’m finding myself typing and erasing, and typing, and erasing, and sitting here staring into a very bright afternoon, and wishing my mother would call me back, and suddenly feeling very, very thirsty.

Brace yourself for a whole bunch of emotional drivel, intertwined with an inordinate amount of social networking references.

On Saturday morning, I found out my 7th grade English teacher had been prompted by–the now Undertoad infamous–Miss Gotzian, to check out this blog. And he did. And then he followed me on Twitter. So I followed him back. One of his tweets prompted me to his Goodreads page, and out of sheer curiosity for just how many books they guy really has read, I requested his friendship there, as well.

Fast forward to Monday night, when I posted my plan to start waking up earlier, as an effort in discipline and focused self-control (over sleep, of all the embarrassing addictions).

At about 3am, I awoke with a nausea so powerful, that though it did not get me out of bed to throw up, it did cause me to dream of throwing up for the next four hours. May I also submit without evidence that this nausea was accompanied by an immediate fever.

And to top it off, Carter was up at 6:30 yesterday morning, doing that thing kids do when they are awake but mom is not. Hovering. At my side of the bed. Just breathing and looking at me.

Apparently Satan, or one of his minions, follows my blog. (Somebody mark that down in my WordPress Milestone stats!)

By the time I realized I was in the throws of a full blown stomach virus, John was already blissfully ignoring all phone calls in court. I texted him to simply say: “I’m having dry heaves diarrhea, and a full-body migraine. I think I can make it until nap-time. I’ll keep you posted.”

The rest of the day is a blur. I went from sleeping on the couch to sleeping in my bed, and I remember telling Eliott to help Carter wipe and not to open the door if anyone rings the doorbell. More than once, I woke up to her singing the “Clean Up” song, which means she was taking her role as substitute Mom more seriously than I would have expected. Carter just kept waking me up to tell me she was hungry. I know she was not hungry, but I think in her two-year old brain, this was the only thing that might get me out of bed. I’m fairly certain, if it came to it, they could have lived off dry Rice Chex and peanut butter (the two things in the pantry they recognize and can reach).

Needless to say, I didn’t get on the computer at all.

So today, as I weaned myself back into the real world with the BRAT diet, and attempted to re-hydrate, you can imagine my surprise to find a message from the aforementioned 7th grade English teacher, in my Goodreads inbox.

It was written on Monday night, apologizing for the bizarre connection, thanking me for the shout out’s to Ender’s Game and Les Mis, and informing me that Miss G had passed away, suddenly, late last week.

So here I sit, all medicine-heady, and already empty, just stunned.

I immediately went to her Facebook page, which, of course has turned in to an Internet memorial site. Scrolling through the notes and memories, I find myself crying when I see a name I recognize, crying more when the sentiment is exactly something I could have said myself.

The woman was loved.

I actually saw Miss G last summer, the weekend of my sister’s wedding in Spokane. Of all the people I could have seen from my hometown, the one and only person I blocked out any time for was her. She drove out to my hotel and spent the better part of an afternoon talking and laughing and catching up. We hugged a teary goodbye and said we need to do this more often. (“Next time–and every time–I’m back in Spokane, I promise.”)

I sort of hate, now, that the blog post which has turned in to my personal memorial, must also share space with a diarrhea story, but I’m not going back to edit. And not because, “This is what Miss G would have wanted,” (honestly, I don’t think she would have cared) but because I have no reason to remember this moment any differently than the way it happened.

I think I can say with complete honesty that Miss G is the first person of real significance in my life, to die. Does that make me sheltered, or lucky, or what? The geographical distance between us for the last decade has been such that I’m not going to walk around in some sort of a cloud of mourning for the next several days or weeks, as I’m sure many are, in her absence. But I am in a bit of a fog, nonetheless.

People always talk about leaving a legacy. I think it’s pretty clear, that she is one woman who did just that. I only hope that one day, after I’m gone, someone has similar memories of my awesomeness, as I, and so many others, have of hers.

At the end of every day in 5th grade, we stood up, put our chairs up, and with backpacks on, recited this poem together, aloud, as a class. I couldn’t actually find it, even when I searched the all powerful Oz (Google) using entire phrases, so what I’ve written is only what I can remember. There are a few gaps. Come on, it’s been 25 years. But somehow, it feels appropriate.

Appropriate that I can remember in such detail, so many things about 5th grade. Appropriate, that my mom and I were just discussing that Miss Gotzian could not possibly have been in her 50s, she looked way too good to be 50. Appropriate that so much of what I’ve said and done in front of this woman has been so inappropriate, and yet she managed to handle me and my 5th grade idiot self, with grace and a really loud laugh.

And appropriate, that almost a year ago exactly, I reconnected with her through my April Fool’s Day Confession, on this blog, and we’ve been in the most close contact of our relationship since that day.

Jill Gotzian, you are loved.

The light that shines for you
The heart that beats for all,
You bring no need to great
You have no hurt to small.

Step now into the Light,
That in this holy place
Shines through the soul’s dark night
And feels prayer’s warm embrace.

Friend, you are not alone,
Look to the light of prayer
Love’s truth come shining plain,
That God is always there.

In Memory. Jill Gotzian, January 24, 1959 – March 1, 2012.

Confessions

Lent Schment

Don’t know if I’ve mentioned this. I was raised Catholic.

And to a very strong extent, there is much about this background that still resonates spiritually and otherwise with me. I suppose I often sit through my (currently) Baptist (or other evangelical) church services with a bit of a God complex or sense of religious-intellectual-superiority that I perhaps wrongly attribute to my childhood of Catholic school and mass.

Call me crazy, but there’s something about the tradition, the liturgy, the stations of the cross, the reciting of the Apostle’s Creed, even those crazy ash tattoos once a year, that somehow had me believing if God listened to anyone’s prayers, He was probably listening to mine. I don’t know why I thought this. Or why I still do, for that matter. But I blissfully blame the Catholic church, and will never begrudge this part of my past.

I also secretly love it when my Baptist friends are surprised to find out that even while I was a Catholic (and gasp, at that) I knew–and loved–Jesus.

Even after my family ceased attending mass and started spending far more than the obligatory sixty minutes in a pew on Sundays, I still attempted to observe Lent every year. In college, I graduated from King Cakes and took things up a notch by kicking Lent off with Baylor’s version of Fat Tuesday. The year my memory remains the spottiest, ironically, was at a party thrown by Truett Seminary students. And who said that Catholics and Baptists can’t find a common ground?

Traditionally, Lent is of course the forty days before Easter when most observing Americans (I assume) attempt to give up things which make us fat, smell bad, or run slower. Generally, though we call it “fasting,” it seems to be more of a diet of sorts, often secretly done in the name of losing weight, clearing up our complexions, or becoming more productive. Or was I the only one basing my sacrifice on the things that I thought were negatively in control of some aspect of my appearance?

Now that I’ve had two children though, Lent kind of seems like a joke. I mean. What’s forty days without soda once you’ve gone forty weeks without dairy? And alcohol. And Excedrin Migraine for crying out loud.

So it should come as no shock that today I realized we are now, what, fully two weeks into Lent (?), and I didn’t even notice. Blame my “post-modern” evangelical church and it’s lack of candles and purple drapery. I mean, I completely missed it.

Pardon me, Pope Benedict, but I’ve decided to start my Lenten observance tomorrow.

There is, actually, something I’ve been considering, for months now, and I think I’m finally ready to say enough is enough. I’m addressing the fact that I do not get out of bed before 8 o’clock on any given weekday morning and not before 9:30 on the weekends.

It would truly be a sacrifice to give up that extra hour of sleep I tend to guard, rabid bulldog style, every morning.

(Every mother of children under five on the planet is breaking her Lenten cursing fast right now. Sorry. It is true. I get to sleep in and my children know to just leave me alone. Some mornings, I even come downstairs to find Eliott has toasted me a bagel.)

Truth be told, it is something John and I talk about frequently. He and I both agree that there is something sacred about getting up before the rest of the house and having that first hour to prepare for the day. When we were counseling in the woods, this time often was the difference between a mediocre day (or season) and progress in a group. For John, it was the difference between C’s and A’s in law school. When I was teaching, it allowed me to leave before the afternoon buses, most days of the week.

But now that my life predominantly revolves around feeding my family and making sure my children don’t die, somehow, that competitive edge that had me up before sunrise for so many years of my life, is lacking.

And I miss it.

So this is my plan. John is up and out of the house, most days, an hour and a half before I’m awake. The idea of enjoying my first cup of coffee to Morning Edition is going to have to serve as my rabbit, even if all I do for that extra hour is pray my children stay in bed.

Confessions

What I Wouldn’t Do For a Free Meal and a T-Shirt

I’ve never been one to say no to a free dinner. Or lunch. Or breakfast. Or coffee, for that matter.

What can I say? I like to eat, yes, but I like even more to have someone else feed me. When I imagine a monthly budget more flexible in the “entertainment” division, I do not imagine seeing more movies in a theater, concerts (like John does), or amusement parks. I just want to go out to eat. I would go out to dinner once a week if it was in our budget, just to have a break from my kitchen.

Apparently the word on this has been out, for some time. I’m finding more and more friends luring me in to some volunteer position by beginning the conversation with, “There will be free food.” It’s like they know I’ll say yes without even listening to the rest. Because that is exactly what I do.

In college I actually pretended to be interested in attending Truett Seminary (twice!) because of their annual Spring visitor’s luncheon. (Got two t-shirts too.) I also signed up to be “adopted” by a family and continued to grace them with my presence periodically from my freshman through senior years because Audrey cooked dinner and I could come do my laundry in her garage. It was wonderful. I attended a ropes course training two weekends in a row, and then volunteered my services for the rest of the year at a camp for kids with disabilities because it meant getting out of the dorms from Friday night through Sunday and eating good old fashioned camp food. (I believe some t-shirts were thrown in to this package as well.) I might as well say it. This little free food fetish is highly likely the number one reason I am currently a Baptist.

Our first church as a married couple? The only one we even visited in Greensboro? We got a card in our mailbox that said, “Join us at 10:15 Sunday for our Curbside Cafe of coffee, donuts, and other snacks.” Done.

This leads me to my current predicament.

The YMCA’s Annual Giving Campaign.

About a month ago, a girl friend called (while I was cooking dinner, she’s that smart) and all I can remember from the conversation goes something like this: “…YMCA…there will be a dinner thing…you’d be on a team with me and Carolina…do you want to do it?” Okay, so realistically, I heard dinner, and the fact that two of my friends would be there, and said yes.

Four weeks, two free dinners, a lunch, $50 and a t-shirt later, I have a stack of green and yellow papers (thick cardstock, to be exact), of people I am supposed to connect with, preferably face-to-face, tell my “Y Story” to, and then ask for money.

First problem: My Y Story.

Here is my Y Story: if you give money, it will support people who are on financial aid scholarships to be members at the Y. People. Uh, me. In fact, every $30 dollars I collect, is another month my familycan currently afford the Y, which I will continue to patronize, at least two (but upwards of five days a week in the summer) to sit on a stationary bike or a couch in the lobby, read a book, drink some coffee, and give my children a social outlet that does not include me trying to do crafts with them at the kitchen table.

How does that sound?

Alas.

Second problem: Ask for Money.

Unfortunately, the majority of the people I hang out with on a semi-regular basis, are also sacrificing in the comforts department in order to stay home with young children, while their husbands are at the beginning of their careers (or still in school), looking at a lifetime of student loans, and wondering how in the heck the current rate for a non-degree’d babysitter can possibly be $10 an hour.

“Our” goal is about $200,000 this year. Truly, this money is all used to support community members who would otherwise not be able to afford membership, a season of soccer for their kids, a week at summer camp, swimming lessons, or a support group for those with cancer. Amazingly, none of it will build a new building, extend a parking lot, or construct a new sauna in the locker room. It all goes into financial aid. This is, actually, something I can rally behind.

Mid bite of my free catered pork slider, I did some number crunching. $200K, divided by the number of YMCA families (not individual members) means that if each family gave just $33 this year, we’d have our goal. That actually seems doable.

John and I gave. Even in the last few months of our financial assistance, we agreed that we could afford a gift.

So now I just have to figure out how to pass this little nugget along to that stack of card stock still sitting in my desk, calling me to get on the ball.