Time for a family update!
Something rather unusual happened this morning. I woke up before anyone else (baby went back to sleep after her early-morning feeding, and I stayed awake), and after I stumbled around our semi-dark kitchen for awhile preparing my coffee, Jonathan came downstairs. The sunrise was beautiful and pink, and it was such a rarity to have Jonathan wake up first. Normally Henry is the first one up, and he's been gifted with lots of volume, so most mornings he wakes up J and almost everyone else :) Sissy often manages to sleep through the commotion of two not-so-little boys starting their day, and likes to lay in her bed and talk to herself, snuggle her zebra, and I think enjoy the only portion of her day that will be quiet and alone.
Jonathan and I snuggled up onto the couch for a few quiet minutes. His body is so big now- his head comes up past my shoulder, and his feet stretch down next to mine. His hands are getting rougher, and his arms and legs have young muscles. Somehow through conversation we got to talking about how life seems to go faster the older we get. I held out my fingers and showed him how when only 6 fingers are raised, adding one more seems really noticeable. I told him that I'm almost 3 sets of hands old, so adding one more finger to my set isn't quite as profound- it almost happens without being noticed.
I've heard several times recently, and it really feels true, that the days are long and the years are short. This last week felt very much that way. Josh has been blessed with lots of work, and the days have been very, very long... but this morning it felt like we'd just had a Sunday, and here we are back around again!
Jonathan spends a lot of time creating in this stage of life. He will stay immersed in Legos or drawing for large portions of a day. He loves math, and has finally gotten past the frustrating part of learning to read. His abilities are beginning to catch up with his imagination, so he can finally DO the things he thinks up. He is still a million miles an hour, but is learning to manage his body day by day. Sometimes he'll be flying through the house and pause to sweetly oogley-google the baby, revealing what I believe will be a dynamic father someday. Then he's off to the next adventure!
Henry is discovering a different corner of the family dynamic. Sissy has started to want to play with the big kids, and Jonathan has been deep in his world of creating things, so Ruby and Henry have started to bond a little more. He is very sweet to her, and gently takes her hand and leads her places. He is willing to play dress up or picnic with her, and when he's in the mood for it, they do really well together. He likes to slowly, meticulously, place things in rows... cars, muffin cups into the tin, counting blocks onto the table...
His little body continues to grow too, he has thick, course, blonde hair, and some serious muscles. That boy is going to be, as we say, "legit". :) The tough-guy portion of his personality comes out in the form of Hulk-smash! He comes down a couple mornings a week decked out in his full-body, muscles-built-in, Hulk costume! I love the paradox of his gentleman, sweet side, and the loud, tough portions of him, and I love the variety of his huge, loud voice in contrast with how he loves to do things ever so slowly.
Sissy changed by leaps and bounds over the summer. Her hair is long and gently curly, and her little body is tall and sweetly slender. She loves shoes, hats and purses, and is beginning to articulate. She often plays coy and pretends she can't say much, but sometimes her little mouth just goes and goes, and a whole string of new words come out. This usually happens when her and I are alone and the house is quiet, and she's well rested. Speaking of rest, she has been playing in her bed during naptime (instead of sleeping...), and when I came to get her a few afternoons ago she was rocking her stuffed zebra and pointed to it, "bay-bee". She loves to have frozen blueberries in a measuring cup for breakfast (which the boys think is super silly). She stands on her little red chair at the counter, eating the blueberries out of the measuring cup while I do the dishes. She likes to have things tidy, and will clear other peoples dishes off the table, throw garbage away on her own, and pack as many toys as she can into her little purses. She has a cheesy, toothy little grin, mischievous wrinkles in her nose, and a hug that tugs at our hearts.
All of a sudden, LilyAnne is 5 months old! She can roll tummy to back now, and seems pretty confused when she does! I'm discovering that I've been rather lax about training her to sleep well, and I must, must buckle down and do it. I need to put her to bed earlier, and I need to let her learn to "self-soothe". I remember a point with Ruby where I realized that she was much older than I thought her to be in my brain, and needed to catch up with how I was caring for her... that point with LilyAnne is now :) She is such a happy little peach, with huge smiles when she makes eye contact. She will patiently sit in her swing and watch me go about my house work, and light up when I pause to interact with her. She still has very curious eyes, and I know there's so, so much more personality to come!
Something rather unusual happened this morning. I woke up before anyone else (baby went back to sleep after her early-morning feeding, and I stayed awake), and after I stumbled around our semi-dark kitchen for awhile preparing my coffee, Jonathan came downstairs. The sunrise was beautiful and pink, and it was such a rarity to have Jonathan wake up first. Normally Henry is the first one up, and he's been gifted with lots of volume, so most mornings he wakes up J and almost everyone else :) Sissy often manages to sleep through the commotion of two not-so-little boys starting their day, and likes to lay in her bed and talk to herself, snuggle her zebra, and I think enjoy the only portion of her day that will be quiet and alone.
Jonathan and I snuggled up onto the couch for a few quiet minutes. His body is so big now- his head comes up past my shoulder, and his feet stretch down next to mine. His hands are getting rougher, and his arms and legs have young muscles. Somehow through conversation we got to talking about how life seems to go faster the older we get. I held out my fingers and showed him how when only 6 fingers are raised, adding one more seems really noticeable. I told him that I'm almost 3 sets of hands old, so adding one more finger to my set isn't quite as profound- it almost happens without being noticed.
I've heard several times recently, and it really feels true, that the days are long and the years are short. This last week felt very much that way. Josh has been blessed with lots of work, and the days have been very, very long... but this morning it felt like we'd just had a Sunday, and here we are back around again!
Jonathan spends a lot of time creating in this stage of life. He will stay immersed in Legos or drawing for large portions of a day. He loves math, and has finally gotten past the frustrating part of learning to read. His abilities are beginning to catch up with his imagination, so he can finally DO the things he thinks up. He is still a million miles an hour, but is learning to manage his body day by day. Sometimes he'll be flying through the house and pause to sweetly oogley-google the baby, revealing what I believe will be a dynamic father someday. Then he's off to the next adventure!
Henry is discovering a different corner of the family dynamic. Sissy has started to want to play with the big kids, and Jonathan has been deep in his world of creating things, so Ruby and Henry have started to bond a little more. He is very sweet to her, and gently takes her hand and leads her places. He is willing to play dress up or picnic with her, and when he's in the mood for it, they do really well together. He likes to slowly, meticulously, place things in rows... cars, muffin cups into the tin, counting blocks onto the table...
His little body continues to grow too, he has thick, course, blonde hair, and some serious muscles. That boy is going to be, as we say, "legit". :) The tough-guy portion of his personality comes out in the form of Hulk-smash! He comes down a couple mornings a week decked out in his full-body, muscles-built-in, Hulk costume! I love the paradox of his gentleman, sweet side, and the loud, tough portions of him, and I love the variety of his huge, loud voice in contrast with how he loves to do things ever so slowly.
Sissy changed by leaps and bounds over the summer. Her hair is long and gently curly, and her little body is tall and sweetly slender. She loves shoes, hats and purses, and is beginning to articulate. She often plays coy and pretends she can't say much, but sometimes her little mouth just goes and goes, and a whole string of new words come out. This usually happens when her and I are alone and the house is quiet, and she's well rested. Speaking of rest, she has been playing in her bed during naptime (instead of sleeping...), and when I came to get her a few afternoons ago she was rocking her stuffed zebra and pointed to it, "bay-bee". She loves to have frozen blueberries in a measuring cup for breakfast (which the boys think is super silly). She stands on her little red chair at the counter, eating the blueberries out of the measuring cup while I do the dishes. She likes to have things tidy, and will clear other peoples dishes off the table, throw garbage away on her own, and pack as many toys as she can into her little purses. She has a cheesy, toothy little grin, mischievous wrinkles in her nose, and a hug that tugs at our hearts.
All of a sudden, LilyAnne is 5 months old! She can roll tummy to back now, and seems pretty confused when she does! I'm discovering that I've been rather lax about training her to sleep well, and I must, must buckle down and do it. I need to put her to bed earlier, and I need to let her learn to "self-soothe". I remember a point with Ruby where I realized that she was much older than I thought her to be in my brain, and needed to catch up with how I was caring for her... that point with LilyAnne is now :) She is such a happy little peach, with huge smiles when she makes eye contact. She will patiently sit in her swing and watch me go about my house work, and light up when I pause to interact with her. She still has very curious eyes, and I know there's so, so much more personality to come!
Our routine has changed some since school started back up. Daddy sneaks out to work very early, around the time LilyAnne wakes up for her early feeding. I pull her into bed with me and we snuggle and nurse for a little while. Then the boys begin to clunk and thump upstairs, and occasionally call down, "Momma can we please come dooooowwwwwnnnnn?" (they put a lot of tonal fluctuation in 'down' :) ). After I've made my coffee I let them come down and have their breakfast. Lately they've been making their beds themselves (hallelujah.), and I almost always have to send them back up to put their pjs away.
This is the part of the day where our routine has changed. I still have them do their "jobs" mid-morning because I like how it adds a sense of purpose and structure to the beginning of their day, but I've decided to postpone schoolwork until later in the day. It's been rather frustrating trying to juggle baby/toddler/kinder/first grader all at once and actually accomplish something academic and enriching, and it dawned on me after it happened accidentally a few times that I should start doing school in the afternoon while the girls nap. Quiet, naptime hours are such a precious commodity that at first I was reluctant to give up ANY of it, but it has been a really wonderful shift. In the morning I can allow all the kids to be kids- to play, to be loud, to make messes, I can snuggle them, rock them, and tote them along for my housework. In the morning we go with the baby/toddler schedule. Then after lunch we begin to shift gears, tidy up a little, and wrap up any house-projects the morning allowed. I put Roo and LilyAnne down for naps, and out come the school books. On the days that I'm exhausted or out of sorts I have the boys do their quiet hour first and then school, but the goal is school first and quiet hour second. I have found that for this season afternoon school allows me to do one on one with each boy without being one-handed while nursing, and without a toddler crumpling books and papers and gnawing the erasers off every pencil :)
During quiet hour I rotate through a handful of things... rest, prep dinner BY MY SELF, pay bills, etc. I've actually been writing "rest" on my to-do lists, because I need to. A happily rested, peace-filled Momma is more necessary in a home than organization and decoration.
That brings me to my next thought.
I know that in the above paragraphs I chose to only write directly about beautiful growth in my kids. I didn't write just those things to make it seem to you like my family is easy and amazing and perfect. I didn't write those things to convince MYSELF that my family is better than it is. I wrote those things to remind myself when I feel like I'm failing- that growth does not happen all at once. Children are crafted and shaped like pottery, around and around again, shaping and scraping and molding, removing the extras, around again. Sometimes I need to write about growth so that I can zoom out from the around and around, and see clearly that growth has actually happened.
Not a super long time ago I drove myself crazy trying to keep my whole house clean all. the. time. I don't know why, really, because no one's house really is. I do know that our enemy pressed on me about this, and if I gave an inch he would push and push and I would feel failure at every turn. Every thread that wasn't in it's place became failure until my whole house was shouting at me. God has steadily been working on me with this, pressing back. With each new layer of life added, at some point I became incapable of dotting every "i" and crossing every "t", and each thing left undone backed me further into a corner. I needed perspective change. Slowly, when I look at my Creator, I see my messes differently. I put myself on a cleaning schedule to ensure that the truly necessary got done (laundry, floors, toilets). Bit by bit I still work on organization, but what has changed is that someone very wise told me that I only have a need for organization BECAUSE I HAVE BEEN BLESSED WITH ABUNDANCE. If I only had exactly what I needed and no more, I wouldn't have piles and piles of kids shoes exploding all over our entryway. My closet would not be overflowing out into the room, changing it from a "walk-in" to a "can't-shut-the-door-anymore". I wouldn't have piles and boxes and craziness in my attic. I need to see the mess as abundance.
The same is true with my kids. It's sooooooo easy to see my kids in their crazy, never ending energy, their naughty streaks, the repetitive discipline they need, the ways they hurt each other and me so often, over and over.
I need to see those messes as abundance. I'm strung out and haggard because God has trusted me with more kids than I can handle without Him. He's given me children that are not trained easily because He has HUGE things for them that require great strength and leadership. They make such relational messes because their spirits are free, and unafraid. They are abundance.
When God has me in a different place I will write about the messes and failures, but right now I see those too easily and without His help.
Today I choose to rejoice in abundance.
What a mighty God we serve!
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