Category Archives: mothering

routine maintenance: when life is under construction

Posted on by June 23, 2018

Fourteen weeks. Past most of the morning sickness, still soooper tired off and on, and always hungry. As I type this, a salad bowl the size of a small bathtub is next to my laptop.

Vince has been home for the last seven of those weeks and we’re (slowly) getting into a routine. I’m starting to get some work in. Not as much as I’d like, but now I’m more productive than the cats, who just nap on piles of laundry all day and chase after loose Nerf darts.

routine maintenance: when life is under construction

I’ve been plowing (ahem – “plowing” should be loosely interpreted) through my book to get it ready for the editor in two weeks. Vin has been working on his website and it’s entertaining in a sadistic sort of way, watching him struggle through the aggravation of navigating WordPress’s bleep-bloop room like I’ve done for years; now he yells at his computer as much as I do. It’s sort of like those contraction and labor simulator belts that let husbands in on the joy of pain in childbirth.

The kids still do school a few hours a day because we’re fun parents like that and don’t like reviewing how to add and subtract in the fall. Finnegan roams around with his own agenda, playing with a pair of tongs he pilfered from the kitchen. Or drawing on himself and the floor with dry erase marker. Or licking the solidified residue at the bottom of Vince’s ice cream dish from the night before.

But at least he’s moved past the phase of dumping popcorn kernels onto the kitchen floor, or trying to put Reagan’s barrettes in his hair, or walking down the hallway with no pants, but wearing someone’s pink slipper on one foot and a blue slipper on the other.

Toddlers are awesome. I still can’t believe we’re doing this all over again.

I love routines, but they’re hard to fight for during seasons like this, and it’s going to be like this for a while. Life happens – a new baby, a major illness, a move, a new nap schedule, a new school or work schedule – and our structure is shaken and sifted. Sometimes I am shaken and sifted with it.

House-wise in this season, we’re used to the noise of traffic, trains, and planes from JBER flying over us. And now we’re getting acquainted with summer noises, like every night around 10 or 11pm – it’s still bright as day then – when someone buzzes around the trails on a machine that sounds like a hybrid between a moped and a weedwhacker.

Added to that, our stretch of the highway is under construction right now, with all the rumbling, beeping, digging, and spraying, and if you listen closely, there’s probably also an undertone of children whining and exasperated drivers using expletives at various decibel levels.

For example, when I tried to leave our neighborhood Wednesday night: My blinker was blinking left, I was in the lane that turns left, and the way left was clear since traffic was blocked in both directions, but the flagger sent me north toward Willow instead. This is a good time to let you know that I still need Jesus.

I buttonhooked at the first opportunity and came back south, and within a quarter mile a line of cones appeared out of nowhere dividing the two lanes in front of me – no flagger, no signs, no indication of what the cones were there for or which lane to take. Being lazy, I stayed in my own lane, which is a good thing because around the bend in two-tenths of a mile, the other lane was closed off with cones. Whiskey-Tango-Fill-in-the-blank. Anyone in it would have to stop on the highway, get out of their vehicle, and creatively rearrange cones on behalf of the DOT in order to escape the maze and continue on their way.

Passing a mile of vehicles headed north at a standstill, I determined to take the scenic route home. It worked until I was within sight of our house – I could see the eave of our roof from where we were parked on the highway.

I know the construction is for maintenance. The disruption is to a good purpose, just like the life events that rock the routines I lean on, sifting and stretching me. The truth is, I always need Jesus – and sometimes He sees fit to shake my complacency and remind me how much.

Plenty of things are still the same and may never change. Finnegan, at almost any time of day, can be found eating oatmeal and drinking his tea from a sippy cup, flaunting the British side of his heritage in all its glory. Meanwhile, also at almost any time of day, bigger kids loiter in the kitchen like it’s some recreational arena, getting in the way of my genuine, desperate American need for bacon and coffee.

And at almost any time of night, Alaska is still awake and making noise, though we don’t even notice most of it anymore.

Except for the other night. Around 12:30 when we were climbing into bed, we heard the familiar high-pitched, cranking buzz going down the road.

“The guy riding the weedwhacker is running late tonight,” I said.

Vince turned off the light. “Probably got stuck in construction traffic.”

how we do it all

Posted on by May 25, 2022

The sun blazed with enthusiasm this morning, but by the afternoon storm clouds rolled over and we had rain pouring off the roof in sheets, and hail pounded the windows on the north side of the house. Alaska was showing off, trying to do it all in the same day. But after about 30 minutes it wore itself out and cleared again, like a toddler after tantrum…or, like a mama whose caffeine-driven spurt of productivity has worn off, and she collapses on the couch for a breather.

how we do it all

It is a year of surprises. The night before I sent the last newsletter, when Vince had only three days left at the business he’d worked for 21 years, we found out we are pregnant.

No, nope, we didn’t see that coming at all. To say we were shocked would be a gross understatement.

But yes, in case you were wondering, we know how this happens, and we like it, but this is still, ahem, another miracle that must’ve involved supernatural intervention, like the one we had a few years ago. You know, the adorable blond one named Finnegan.

So in that newsletter when God had been teaching me for weeks about stretching our tent pegs, I wrote it thinking He was mostly talking specifically to me about writing and business. But when I proofread it before sending it off and He said, You know how to do this, you’ve done it before. You’ve just never seen it like this, I knew He was talking about this gift, which, I’ll be honest, I did not feel ready for.

But Vince has been home for three weeks, and he hit the ground running – putting in a lawn, redoing the kitchen floor, finishing his book, working on cover design, and starting to convert the former garage to a rec room, since the Stagecoach couldn’t fit in it anyway.

I, on the other hand, hit the ground and sunk in up to my waist with all day morning sickness and fatigue, taking two naps a day and stumbling around the house in a nauseous haze. My deadlines are not my own; they are not the priority right now. Right now is for resting and getting through this first trimester, and I’m reconciled to be behind schedule by at least a month or two because we are unexpectedly ahead with a baby.

The night after I sent the newsletter, I sat in the bottom of the shower and poured it all out to God, ready to be honest with Him and myself. I didn’t know how we were going to do this. And, since we’re being honest, I still don’t know how we are going to do this.

But I know that we are. Because really, do we ever know how we’re going to do it? I don’t think so.

…Our false self demands a formula before he’ll engage; he wants a guarantee of success, and mister, you aren’t going to get one. So there comes a time in a man’s life when he’s got to break away from all that and head off into the unknown with God. This is a vital part of our journey and if we balk here, the journey ends.

– John Eldredge, Wild at Heart

I don’t know how I did everything when I was in my early twenties and overwhelmed with one baby – that hard transition we go through when suddenly our life is not our own. Did you? I don’t know how I did everything in the transition from one child to two anymore than I know how I did it when we went from two to three, to four, to six when we adopted two at once and life went completely upside down.

I remember doing the math when I was pregnant with Iree and I braced myself, assuming that two kids would be twice the work. And it ended up being easier than I expected. And then I thought, Well, heck, the transition from one to two was so much easier than I expected that, hey, going from two kids to three kids ought to be a piece of cake. Right? But, au contraire! Not for me, at least. That was a rude shock.

Because there is no formula.

But there is a ridiculously impossible rule of opposites that goes something like this: Kid #2 will be the opposite of Kid #1 (so far, so good), and then Kid #3 will be the opposite of both of them (wait, what?), and every succeeding child will still be another contradicting paradox, resulting in a parenting dynamic that looks like a huge polygon with lines connecting all of its vertices, like so.

This is why we were all mostly perfect parents when we only had one kid to figure out, and then as our families grew, it felt like we were being promoted to a new level of discovering our own ineptitude.

We want answers to fix everything and everyone, and He reminds us that we don’t have those answers, and we are confounded.

Naturally, we are inclined to be so mathematical and calculating that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing…Certainty is the mark of the common-sense life; gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness; it should rather be an expression of breathless expectation.

– Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

It is not what we expected. Our floor is in a constant state of looking like a scene from Home Alone – where it isn’t padded with Nerf darts, it is carpeted with giant 24-piece puzzles.

It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.

– Proverbs 25:2, ESV

One of the phrases I hear most (aside from Wow, you sure have your hands full, ugh, so help me) is “I don’t know how you do it.” I don’t know how I do it either. But I don’t know how any of us do it. I don’t think we’re supposed to know. If we knew, we’d take the credit, and it doesn’t belong to us.

That credit goes to the Day Maker who has always done it all and brings miracles even when we don’t think to ask for them, and He will keep doing it.

something out of nothing: how He moves us

Posted on by April 29, 2024

Our thoughts turn into prayers, and I don’t know if they were our thoughts first or His. But when our thoughts are His thoughts, our prayers become reality because He is such a troublemaker sometimes.

something out of nothing: how He moves us

There was no railroad there now, but someday the long steel tracks would lie level on the fills and through the cuts, and trains would come roaring, steaming and smoking with speed. The tracks and the trains were not there now, but Laura could see them almost as if they were there.

Suddenly she asked, “Pa, was that what made the very first railroad?”

“What are you talking about?” Pa asked.

“Are there railroads because people think of them first when they aren’t there?”

Pa thought a minute. “That’s right,” he said. “Yes, that’s what makes things happen, people think of them first.”

– Laura Ingalls Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake

Two years ago I wrote a list of things I would do if I had more time – all the millions of things we couldn’t do because Vince commuted (and did all of our family shopping) for almost 60 hours a week – and none of them were ambitious. They were pathetically in the vein of survival mode.

Find a therapist for one of the kids. Attend FreshStart with one of the other kids. Read all the books and watch all the videos and resources and trainings for our kids’ special needs. Buy pajamas for Finnegan, and get a haircut, and start putting effort into cooking better meals again. Clean the bathroom, and eat breakfast before noon.

Most of them never got done. Well, sometimes I cleaned the bathroom. And the older kids learned to cook.

Many of those things, looking back, I wish we could have done somehow. Seems like we would have benefited from them, but for crying out loud, we must breathe sometime. And there was no time.

We wanted to be together more, and together less. We needed one-on-one time with each of the kids and each other. Vince needed to be home more for the kids, and I needed to be out of the house more for my own sanity.

But other things were on that list, too. We both wanted to be more involved in ministry. I wanted to visit my grandma more often. I wanted to write daily, and study, and not feel guilty about it because there was always something else I should be doing.

I wanted to finish the books I’d started. And Vince did, too.

And maybe you noticed – I purposefully left that goal vague when I wrote it, unsure if I meant the books I’d started reading or the books I’d started writing. Because I wanted both, but was afraid to hope that big.

It was a someday-but-probably-never kind of daydream.

Until about five weeks ago.

What results is almost miraculous. We create new alternatives – something that wasn’t there before….What is synergy? Simply defined, it means the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It means that the relationship which the parts have to each other is a part in and of itself. It is not only a part, but the most catalytic, the most empowering, the most unifying, and the most exciting part.

– Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Five weeks ago, Vince went back to work after taking a month off to finish some backburner projects we’d been praying about for years. On the last day of his vacation, we closed on this house. And we felt strongly that even though he was going back to work, it was only temporary.

We had no idea how it could possibly be temporary; we only knew that God had been talking to us for a long time about a big move and it didn’t just mean our physical location.

We asked Him for years for this move, and He finally said, How bad do you want it? If I give it to you, will you really take it?

The next day was the day of the fridge and the frenulum, and in that post I mentioned a phone meeting with our insurance guy. What I didn’t mention was that during that discussion we learned that a smallish, forgotten nest egg we’d plugged away at for years had actually made itself useful.  And God asked us, Do you believe Me now?

The creative process is also the most terrifying part because you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen or where it is going to lead. You don’t know what new dangers and challenges you’ll find. It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with the spirit of adventure, the spirit of discovery, the spirit of creativity. Without doubt, you have to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness.

– Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

And it’s sort of like when we got married: We eloped, but we talked to my dad ahead of time. Just like then, Vin was a little terrified to tell him, but also just like then, Dad was full of encouragement and good counsel. He said, in so many words, you have to take the risk to know if you can make it.

So, friends: Vince has worked for the same company for 21 years, and he put in his notice this week.

We’ll be home together, out and about together, and working together and separately. His first book is already off to the editor and should launch early this summer. My second book is a month or two behind his (can’t wait to show you the cover!), and the third should come out this fall.

We have a kid who’s on his last year home with us, and we want to do this thing together. We have six other kids we want to make great memories with, and we want to show them what’s beyond the fifty mile radius around us. We haven’t ventured past that in over five years.

We have a bazillion other ideas involving print and publishing, business and ministry, fellowship and community, deep and wide. But mostly, we are available for whatever He has for us, because He is always making something out of nothing. And He’s still moving us.