I turn around from grabbing an ingredient out of the refrigerator and she is there, underfoot.

I stand up after cleaning out the counter under the bathroom sink, and my stiff-from-crouching knees nearly trip over her little body.

I swoosh around the kitchen in a flurry, trying to put groceries away while she keeps one hand on my pant leg.

I settle down to nurse the baby, and her wiggly body is nudging its way first onto my lap, then over my shoulders, then at my feet.

I hurry out the door, and accidentally bonk her in the head with the car seat because she is lingering too close by my side in too tight of a space.

I feel frustration.  I feel too needed.  I want space to myself.  I speak a little too harshly.

And then, when she is in bed and the house is quiet, I sneak into her room and crawl in her bed, where I hold her as close as possible.

And I vow to do better tomorrow.  For she is growing up faster than I can grasp — she is getting more independent by the day.  One day, she won’t want to play the role of my shadow.  And I will miss it.

I think most people agree that most people in the world are generally nice.  Most people will be kind in most situations.

But if you were the woman (who was most likely nice and kind) waiting in line for the bathroom at Burger King in Sparks, Nevada ten days ago and happened to encounter ME, well then — you might change your mind about the whole ‘most people being kind in most situations’ business.

When you were jiggling the handle to the bathroom door every 60 seconds, dear Burger King Bathroom User, you didn’t know the reason for the delay was an almost 4 year old taking her sweet time.  You didn’t know that her mother had begged her to hurry, which predictably produced the complete opposite action.

You didn’t know that minutes before, that sweet almost 4 year old had emptied her bladder in her baby sister’s car seat while her exhausted mother nursed said baby up front.  You didn’t know the exhausted mother was too exhausted to dig through the luggage in the trunk for replacement clothing, so the almost 4 year old was forced to sit in her wet clothing.

Burger King Bathroom User, you didn’t even know why the exhausted mother was exhausted.  You didn’t know she had already been driving for nine to ten-ish hours through a wasteland (Nevada) with the previously mentioned almost 4 year old and baby.  You didn’t know she was doing that all by her lonesome, and that she had already had to make one emergency potty break for the almost 4 year old, foolishly thinking that was going to be the most stressful part of the drive.

You didn’t know that not two hours into the trip, the almost 4 year old had spilled an entire water bottle — just turned it upside down, and let it empty in the space between the center console and the driver’s seat.  You didn’t know that the almost 4 year old had also spilled apple juice all over her blanket hours before, and then snuggled with said blanket.

You didn’t know that the exhausted mother still had four to five-ish hours on the road ahead of her.

So when you jiggled that handle one too many times and the exhausted mother yelled at you, you didn’t know she was immediately sorry.

Because she then silently marched her sorry self and children to the counter, ordered two milkshakes without a glance your way and ran out of there as fast as she could, never looking you in the eye.

And what you didn’t know, dear handle jiggling lady, is that the exhausted mother was paid back for her bad Burger King behavior, when as she entered the long stretch into California through Donner Pass, her almost 4 year old mumbled, “Uh oh.  It’s ok.  Milkshakes dry.”

If you don’t have kids, but think you may one day want them, DON’T read this post!

After staying an extra hour for choir practice, we rushed home from church this afternoon, and I hurried to feed my starving baby while Ryan got busy feeding Lydia and making five loaves of wheat bread.  (Have I told you lately that I love my husband?)

While Emma was finishing eating, I noticed her face start to contort.  As any mother can tell you, the face your child makes before doing her business is a distinctly unique face, and one not to be ignored.

Seconds later, I felt wet warmth on my lap, and knew her diapers had failed to do their job, yet again.  It only took me a millisecond to assess the damage, after which I immediately — and very eloquently– called out for reinforcements.   “AHHHHHH!!!!”

The mess was everywhere, and this was definitely not a one person job.

The hubs left the eldest child (who was being amazingly agreeable) and the mixer to take the baby off my hands while I headed to the bedroom to change my dress, both of us shouting with great amounts of aggravation to each other about our difficulties of removing poop (there, I said the word) covered clothing without spreading the mess.

Happily, I succeeded.  Unhappily, he did not.

It was time for a bath for the little newborn.

While he wiped down the changing table, I gingerly deposited the baby in her tub, only to notice the mess had spread all the way up to her ears.  That is not an exaggeration.  Because the mess was so far reaching, it had also oozed onto the baby tub, which was supposed to be the place where she would get clean.

I needed reinforcements again.   “AHHHHHH!”

The hubs came in to clean the now contaminated tub, while I held the baby under running water, then placed her back into the newly clean tub.

Once all visible traces of the offending mess were gone, I soaked the baby in her tub and vigorously scrubbed her soft little body, while Ryan took the stained clothes downstairs to be laundered.

When we were all together as a family again, Ryan informed me he had noticed the cat had thrown up all over the laundry room floor.

“I didn’t clean it up,” he said.

“I don’t blame you,” I responded.

He then took the sweet smelling, freshly clean little babe from my hands and held her up to his shoulder…

…where she promptly threw up all the contents of her stomach.

My daughter routinely asks me questions and then tells me my answers are wrong.

“What is that bird in the sky doing?” she’ll ask.

“It’s flying,” I’ll say, pointing out the obvious.

“No it’s not.  It’s floating,” she’ll authoritatively respond.

I honestly don’t know why she even asks the questions in the first place.  After several months of these types of conversations, I was pretty certain I had fallen to the bottom of the totem pole in her mind as far as wealth of knowledge was concerned.

Until yesterday when she melted my heart with her loving trust and devotion to my spoken word.

She showed me a picture she had colored and I told her it was beautiful.  She then showed her friend the same picture and said, “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Her friend answered, “No.  It’s not beautiful.  It’s boring.  Mine is beautiful.”

I watched my daughter’s face fall and wondered if this was going to break her heart.  Without any siblings of her own yet, she isn’t used to people around her telling her negative things.  I certainly wasn’t about to jump in and smooth things over because I could see this was a good life lesson, but even so, I also was preparing myself to comfort her when the tears would fall.

But she surprised me.  She looked at her friend and said, “NO.  It’s beautiful because Mommy just told me it’s beautiful.”

I may not know how birds travel in the sky, but I guess when it comes to the important self esteem things, I do know a thing or two after all.

I haven’t posted in a while for two reasons.

1. I have been deathly ill (I do tend to exaggerate.  I am quite certain I never even once teetered on the edge of death in my recent illness, but I just love to add spices of drama here and there).

2. I have been a bad mommy and consequently, have felt quite drained and incapable of performing even my most ordinary tasks.

But things are looking up and I want to tell you what I have learned.

The past few weeks (or months?) I have felt completely hopeless when it comes to parenting my 3 year old.  She hit a stage in which she decided to argue with anything and everything I say.  Unfortunately, her arrival at this stage coincided with my own arrival at a stage of impatience.

Days were filled with frustration, tears, anger and a feeling of failure- for both of us.  I was honestly beginning to feel like we would NEVER get to a point where we enjoy our time together again.

After a particularly awful Saturday which finally ended with Lydia collapsed in my arms and both of us sobbing, I knew I needed to change the course of things.

My husband and I sat down and evaluated our end goals.  In the end, we want our daughter to trust us.  We want her to feel valued.  We want her to make choices on her own and we want her to know we support her and will always help her.  Most importantly, we want her to feel loved unconditionally.

Our parenting over the past few weeks had absolutely not been sending us towards that end goal.  But we felt we had backed our little family in a corner of bad behavior and had no idea how to get out.

So we prayed and the answer came immediately.  We knew exactly what we needed to stop doing and precisely what we needed to start doing.

We’ve since been working hard at reacting LESS to bad behavior and praising good behavior like crazy.  We stopped punishing with timeouts and we’re done taking toys away to push our daughter to behave the way we deem worthy.  We’re giving lots more attention and we’re LISTENING to her.  We’re not doing a perfect job but we’re doing the best we can right now.

And she is literally flourishing in front of our eyes.  She is happier and much more content.  She argues less and less each day and she is more and more a member of our family rather than an issue we need to figure out.

It’s been happy.

The sad thing is we knew we should be parenting this way all along, but we lost our way somewhere.  This parenting style is OUR style (certainly not invented by us, but the style that best suits us) and somewhere in there, we started parenting in a way that just didn’t fit US.

When I was pregnant with Lydia a friend gave me some advice on mothering.  She said, “Remember.  Mom always knows best.”  I thought she was insane. Yes, MY mom always knows best but there was no way that ME as a mom was going to know best.  I didn’t even know how to hold a newborn, how in the world was I ever going to know best?

But you know what?  I do.  I know what’s best for my child.  Because God gave her to me and He trusts me.  And He is helping me make sense of everything I read, hear and experience.  He is helping me sort through my mistakes and swim through the endless sea of parenting philosophies so I can discover, think and ultimately come to instinctively know what is best for my sweet girl.

I think that is the great gift of parenting: we don’t have to do it the way someone else does it in order to do it right.  We get the joy of loving our own children and the comfort of knowing we have a built in ability to know what’s best.

At around 5:15, it all came crashing down.

My daughter, that is.

She had found the one activity- standing on a chair and washing toys at the kitchen sink- that didn’t send her into extreme fits of whining and me into extreme fits of exasperation on this trial of all trials afternoon.

And then she fell.  *Crash Boom* and she was wedged on the floor between the counter and the chair, screaming at the top of her lungs.  I immediately forgot all my anger and frustration with her (loud wails of agony from your firstborn will do that to you) and left my piano student so I could rush in and scoop her up.

I cradled her on the couch while she rested her head on my shoulder, dousing it in snot, spit and tears.  Everything we had said to each other in annoyance and fury in the past couple hours floated through my head.  Had I really been that impatient today?  And had she really turned that purple when she screamed back at me with indignation each time I forbade yet another thing?  Yes, indeed I had and yes, indeed she had.

So there we were.  Crash and boom.  As she was crying for much longer than was necessary, I held her as close as possible.  The fall was scary and it hurt her a little bit too.  But as the minutes ticked by and the sobbing continued, I knew she didn’t really need comfort for the fall anymore.  She needed an understanding mommy more than anything.   She needed a mommy who wasn’t going to be angry and upset.  She needed a mommy who would take as much time as necessary to kiss her boo boos away, rather than shoo her away because of impatience and lack of time.

And I needed to hold her close and help heal her so that I too could be healed.  Her tears washed away the last two hours of rip-my-hair-out frustration and I turned back into the mommy I’m supposed to be.

It all ended with a crash and boom.  And it all started again with a wiped tear, a giggle and cuddles for the rest of the night.

Our 3 year old has no concept of money, so naturally we think it’s the perfect time to start giving her an allowance.  Really, though, we would rather work with a blank slate so we can teach it right.  (Assuming we actually know how to teach it right.)

Our allowance for our pre-schooler plan is slightly ambitious.  There are a lot of categories involved and it may end up being too much, but we need to start somewhere!

She gets $1.00 a week, separated out into ten dimes.

1. We believe in paying a 10% tithing and that is a principle we want to teach to our children. Putting one dime in a jar is an easy way for her to start to understand 10%.  START to understand.  We don’t expect her to get this for a long time, but if the habit is always there, the understanding will come later.

2. One dime goes into savings for college.

3. One dime goes into lifetime savings- retirement. Seriously.  I know this is a huge concept to teach and it’s really early to think about this, but can you imagine if you had put 10% of your money away since you were 3 years old?  She really has no idea what she’s saving for, but again, the habit is being made.  It’s also insurance for us.  She’ll be loaded by the time she retires, so she can take care of us.

4. One dime goes into charity.  I got this idea from a magazine.  At the end of the year, she will choose a charity and we will match her donation.  We did this at Christmas time with a charity gift from my grandparents.  I showed her images of the people or animals that would be helped at 3 different charities and she was allowed to choose one.  She chose to give the money to the animal shelter, so we drove over there and she proudly handed her bill to the administrative people.  They made such a fuss over her that she was positively beaming when we left.  It was a great experience for her.

5. The rest goes into fun. So she puts 60 cents into her fun fund each week.  She is a peculiar girl and doesn’t ask for toys or candy.  We like this about her.  We don’t want to push her towards materialism, and so we explained to her that when she has enough money, she can choose to go out to ice cream or a movie with Daddy.  She is thrilled at that and can’t wait.  As she gets older and starts realizing that she actually wants things, we will explain that she will need to use her fun money to purchase many of those things on her own.  But we just don’t see the point in planting materialistic ideas in her head if they aren’t already there.

I do realize this is a lot to teach a 3 year old.  I really don’t expect her to grasp the whole picture, but I think it will slowly sink in as time goes on.  Eventually, we want to teach her how to invest her savings, how to work for money and other things.  We think that by starting with this basic concept of saving, we’ll open the doors for many teaching moments and it will even force us to become better stewards of our own money.

How do you do allowance with your kids?  What works and what doesn’t work for you?

I have this friend.  She is amazing.  Everybody loves her and she loves everybody.  People are drawn to her.  I have often wondered what it is about her that people unitedly love so much.

She is one of the most grateful people I know.  She is thankful for a good parking spot, thankful for a good joke (really, she’ll thank you if you make her laugh!), thankful for a heartfelt story that touches her.

I wonder if this is why people love her so much.  Being grateful all the time must make her at peace.  And people are drawn to peace, aren’t they?

I want my children to be like this friend.  I want them to have the peace that she has; the kind of peace that makes you glow from the inside.

I don’t know if we’re born with different amounts of gratitude, but I am sure it is something that can be taught and developed.

So I’m teaching Lydia to say “thank you.”  Of course, I teach her to say “thank you” for all the normal polite every day things.  But we’re also reaching out in order to say ”thank you.”  I want Lydia to understand that people do extraordinary things, and we should appreciate that.

We go to a “Wiggle Worms” dance/song group at our library every week.  The librarians who put this together stand up in front of a bunch of moms, dads, and toddlers while they sing, shake, and act excited. 

The kids go crazy with thrilled happiness.  Lydia begs for Wiggle Worms all week long. 

So who better to begin our “thank-quest” with than these wonderful librarians!  I gave Lydia a piece of cardstock and crayons and told her to color it for the Wiggle Worms teachers.  She went to town.  Then, I wrote a simple “Thank You” on the front, a little message on the inside, and signed it from Lydia.

We took it to the library and I handed the card to Lydia so she could give it to the librarians.  She fumbled a little bit, and ended up chucking it straight at their computer, surprising the previously unaware librarians who were huddled around said computer having an intense conversation.

Even though the delivery resembled hate mail, the librarians were excited to receive the card.  Of course, they made a big deal, and helped Lydia feel proud and happy.

How do you teach gratitude to your own children?

The other night, Lydia and I had a mother/daughter date to a local burger restaurant while one armed Daddy was at sign language class.  (Don’t really know how well that could have worked out-see the following picture). 

We sat in a booth next to another mother/daughter combo.  This daughter was in her teens.  I swear I wasn’t eavesdropping, but I can tell you every detail of their conversation.  They were going over a school paper the daughter had written.  The mother read through the paper while the daughter ate her meal.  Then, the mother offered suggestions and critiques while the daughter made changes. 

I was really impressed at the respect the two had for each other.  The daughter easily could have been offended when the mother made critical comments.  But it appears they knew each other well enough to make it work.  The mother presented her sugestions in such a way that the daughter took no offense.  And when the daughter didn’t agree with a suggestion, she refuted the suggestion in such a way that the mother took no offense.

As I listened (NOT eavesdropped, I swear), I taught my daughter how to dip her french fries in fry sauce.  She received the lesson very well, but even so, there were moments where she needed my help.  The trick was to wait until she ASKED for the help (asking is a very fluid term here.  She’s 18 months old, after all).  If I helped too soon, boy, was she ever mad.  But when I waited for her to indicate her need for help, we both got along perfectly.

I know that the next chapter of my life is going to be all about these types of balances.  Letting my child experience new things and allowing her to make mistakes.  Waiting for her to ask for my help.  Giving help without making her feel bad. 

I hope I can do it right.  And I hope that one day, when she’s in high school, we can go to a burger restaurant, dip our fries in the fry sauce, and have a good mother/daughter conversation with mutual respect for each other.

I tiptoe into her room every night.  The door creaks, but she’s grown accustomed to this disturbance and does not move.  I sneak to the side of her crib and suppress a giggle at the position she has found most comfortable for sleeping in that moment- sometimes sprawled across the whole crib, sometimes curled tight, sometimes (and this is my favorite) with her knees under her tummy and her bum in the air.

I lean against the crib rails while I watch her breathe perfect breaths- mesmerized by the rise and fall of her chest and tummy.

I reach down and touch her soft, round tummy to feel those perfect inhales and exhales.  I stare at her tiny body, which really is so big compared to how we brought her home 18 months ago.

I smooth her hair and let my hand linger on her perfect, round cheeks.

Sometimes she stirs, and I quickly leave the room so as not to wake her from dreamland.

My husband just confessed that he often intentionally wakes her so he can hold her while she is in her most cuddly state.

Why didn’t I think of that?