When Eli found a cool Tie Fighter Pilot helmet/mask on sale at a local antiques market, he HAD to have it.

I let him buy it on one condition: that it will be this year’s Halloween costume.

He said it was too awesome NOT to be!

Anyway, he walks by me today, wearing it, having added a set of headphones…

“Look, Mom. I’m DJ Trooper.”

And then he acted like he was scratching a record and danced away from me.

These kids keep me laughing!

If I didn’t already have his cold, I’d certainly have caught it now!

Oh well –  kisses from my kids are worth whatever plagues they give me. <3

Investing in Motherhood

I wouldn’t be where I am today without all the lovely moms who’ve invested into my life.

My mom and her mom, my grandmother, Honey….

And them again, years later, in 1986….

Honey with me in 1989, at my sister’s wedding….

And Mama with me at my wedding, in 1991…

Honey holding my first baby, Zach, in 1998….

Mother’s Day was always about honoring the special women in my life, but from the time I got married until we were blessed with Zach seven years later, that second Sunday in May always equaled pain and longing as I struggled through infertility and pregnancy loss.

These little blessings made my joy complete. Truly my cup runneth over…

There’s no way to put a value on all the things they’ve given me — dandelion bouquets and hand-made cards rank higher than diamonds on my wish list.

For a lighthearted look at Mother’s Day gift giving, check out the following:

My Top Ten Worst Gifts for Mother’s Day

There is never, ever a dull moment around here, and for that, I am beyond thankful.

And finally, my mother’s heart revealed, with thoughts that still hold true:

What Motherhood Has Given Me

Have a beautiful, blessed day, my friends!

First…we needed to get one good, head-on shot of Jonah smiling for a Mother’s Day gift.

Twenty camera-clicks later, we gave up. But this collage shows some of the pics we captured. It’s worth clicking to see it bigger!

Photographing boys is a lot like herding cats. Although we did get one good shot, the big one at the bottom. It didn’t work for the project I was doing, but it was priceless, nonetheless.

Especially when I edited it in black-and-white…

Which reminds me of this graphic I’ve been seeing on Facebook:

In other news, Eli cracked me up when one of his molars came out the other night.

It was late, and he brought me the tooth in a ziplock baggie.

“Look, mom –I know you’re tired, I’m tired. Let’s just forget this whole ‘tooth fairy’ thing and take care of it right now. That way, you don’t have to worry about digging around under my pillow, and maybe hurting your feet on some Legos trying to get to the bed.” And then he handed me my wallet.

I couldn’t help but laugh as I forked over two dollars (one for the last tooth he lost, when the “tooth fairy” forgot to show up…don’t judge me…you know you’ve forgotten at least once, too!).

“Nice doing business with ya, son,” I said.

“Nice doing business with you!” he replied, and pocketed his money, smiling.

You just never know what’s going to happen around here next. But they usually share a common theme.

Earlier, Zach went to put on his shoe and felt something strange inside it.

He fished out my old iPhone. Gee, wonder how that got there, JONAH???

I also just went into the bedroom and found the ONE deodorant that doesn’t cause me to scratch my pits like a flea-infested chimp, crumbled all over the floor.

Wonder how that happened, JONAH???

I don’t even want to ask why there’s a dirty fork on the bathroom floor….

Eli’s been asking for a bamboo plant for a while. Why? I don’t know. He just thinks bamboo is cool.

So when I saw these bamboo plants at IKEA for a couple of bucks, I thought I’d get him one.

He was even more excited about it than I thought he’d be!

He said he was going to name it Bambi and keep it in his room. Then he and his dad looked up all sorts of interesting facts about bamboo, such as it being the fastest growing plant on Earth. Some species have been measured to grow over 4 feet in 24 hours. Of course, Eli was convinced that his plant will do that, too.  Ever the young scientist, he measured “her” and asked me to take these pics, to keep track of Bambi’s growth.

A boy and his bamboo — it’s a beautiful thing.

Hahaha!

(I don’t have the heart to remind him how most plants don’t live long under my Black Thumb O’Death. However, bamboo sounds almost zombie-like in its ability to survive. So maybe she’ll be OK.)

I haven’t been doing so well lately. My lupus has been flaring a bit. Stress can trigger it, and I’ve been cowering under a heaping ton ’0′ that lately.

I can’t get my mind to stop racing; it just ping-pongs from one issue to another, all day and all night long. Even my dreams are laced with oddly unresolved scenarios that leave me feeling tired and unsettled when I wake.

The adoption is more stressful than any pregnancy ever was. This has been my most trying year teaching the boys since we started homeschooling six years ago. I don’t know how my husband puts up with me, as he gets almost zero attention from his wife anymore. He is sweet and understanding, but I miss him.

I miss us.

Those are the bigger issues. I could rapidly fire off another ten issues, most of which interlink with the above, but I’ll spare you because rehashing them doesn’t do any of us any good.

It’s just been….hard.

Really hard lately. I haven’t told anyone how hard.

And has always been my history, I self-medicate with solitude and food.

Not gobs and gobs of food, mind you. I’m sure if you see me, you figure I’m one of those who sits around eating a pound of bacon and a box of donuts in one sitting, but that’s never been true of me. I was cursed with PCOS, and with it, the metabolism of an 80-year-old sloth. It doesn’t take much veering off the healthy food path for me to gain weight at lightning speed.

After half a dozen failed memberships, I finally figured out the reason Weight Watchers has never worked for me: they give me far too many calories to eat. Unless I set my calorie intake significantly below any normal recommended range for my age and size, I can’t lose an ounce — not even with exercise.

Since January, the stress has been piling up and so have the pounds. A few months of late nights, spent watching “Four Weddings”, “Downton Abbey”, “Chopped” and a handful of other shows on the DVR while having a bowl of ice cream, or some wine and cheese, and I’ve put on over a dozen more pounds without doing anything particularly outrageous.

It’s odd that I look at those late hours as something I’ve earned after these stressful days, some time to escape with something I like, while everyone else is asleep and no one is bugging me. Somehow I’ve managed to make myself believe that I’ve earned that time, that I deserve those treats and I get pretty irritated if I miss that time alone. But the reality is that even those non-extravagant snacks completely undo any good I might’ve done, diet-wise, during the day.

I hate gaining weight, yet I gain, despite knowing this truth about myself — that if I am not being extraordinarily mindful and committed to fitness, I blow up like a puffer fish.

And I haven’t had the mental energy lately to be mindful about anything except putting out the fires from the major issues I mentioned above.

But…

There’s always a “but”.

I had some prayer time tonight. Now, that sounds all holy and proper, but let me tell you — it wasn’t like that at all. It wasn’t as it should be, a time that I planned for and set aside for God. No, it was after a harried shower, when I sat down on the bed to put lotion on my feet and I just cracked, my face crumpling into the Ugly Cry, stress just suddenly boiling over, oozing out all over the place before I even knew what was happening.

As if the force of sitting down on the bed made something snap and all of a sudden, I’m a blubbering, snot-dripping mess.

Sometimes God does that to us. If we run long enough, if we try to hide after we’ve committed our lives to him, He comes and finds us. And renders us helpless to do anything but sit there and listen.

After a good, long cry (my face so frozen into the Ugly Cry Crumple that my forehead actually ached) and some time with my Father, I came away realizing a few things.

One, that TV and snack time at night is never going to be enough self-care to make up for all the ways I neglect myself the other 22 hours of the day. It’s pretty ridiculous to think that it ever could be.

It’s like when you fly, and the flight attendant tells you to put your own oxygen mask on first and then help those around you. If you’re not breathing right, it’s not going to be long before you go from the role of Helper to the One Needing Help. In other words, if you don’t take care of yourself, you’re not of much use to anybody.

And yep, that would be me right about now: Utterly useless, from self-imposed causes.

Two, I thought of the things that should be my non-negotiables; the things I do each day so that I can be the best wife, mom and friend I can be. Here is the list I made:

1. Get enough sleep.
2. Feed my spirit (prayer/Bible).
3. Consume healthy fuel for my body (food).
4. Get an hour of physical activity.
5. Make meaningful marriage connections (communication, hugs, etc.).
6. Solitude (because, as an introvert, I truly have to have some quiet time alone to recharge).

I can’t be the only mom who struggles to provide herself with these things on a daily basis. But look at it — that list is so simple. Really, almost shockingly simple.

Note that the kids didn’t make the list. Neither did my work. Of course, most of the time, the kids are my work. They don’t need to be on the list because they are always there, front-and-center, making their demands on me as they should. There’s no need to prioritize them on the list because like the air I breathe, they just ARE.

Finally, the third thing that struck me is to realize that there really is something to that old Serenity Prayer.

Because if I do what it says, I can put an end to that game of mental ping-pong that plays inside my mind 24/7.

Change the things I can. Release the things I can’t. Ask God to help me understand the difference.

I can’t get my daughter here from Uganda any quicker by worrying about it. I can’t possibly know what it’s going to be like to be in Africa until I am there, and fretting over that trip now isn’t going to change a thing. I won’t always meet everyone else’s deadlines or expectations. I can’t make things perfect for people who don’t want to do their part make that perfection happen. I can’t take on other people’s worries, or overcommit myself to causes that I don’t have time for, or in any other way take on problems that God himself isn’t asking me to bear. When presented with a problem, I need to look it over, and then release it back to God — however many times it takes to do truly, genuinely release it.

That list of six things? Those are things that I can do, things that I truly must do, and they don’t have to wait til Monday. Or even tomorrow.

Starting tonight, I can go to bed instead of sitting in front of the tube with a cup of ice cream.

And that, my friends, is exactly what I’m going to do.

They really did enjoy them, despite the expressions above.

Jonah accidentally got ice cream on his nose, which he thought was hilarious. So he started dabbing ice cream on his nose, on purpose, for laughs.

Couldn’t quite catch a shot of that, but I think he’s cute, regardless.

(You should click to enlarge the photos and truly experience the gruesomeness that IS red velvet cake.)

Especially when my favorite batter-scooping-spoon is nowhere to be found, and I have to improvise, filling cupcake holders with a small ladle.

It ain’t pretty.

EEEEEEEEEEEK!!!

It’s like Halloween in April over here today.

Ah, the fashion sense of a preschooler!

“Cars” pajama pants paired with a Christmas sweater vest.

I think he’s rockin’ it. How ’bout you?

Whenever I tell people that I’m taking my 11-year-old son, Eli, to see a performance at Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts, they usually lift an eyebrow and ask something along the lines of “Isn’t he a little old for that?”

I can see why they think so. I mean, the words “puppet show” conjure up memories of simple Punch-and-Judy puppets smacking each other behind a makeshift curtained stand; something entertaining to a 3-year-old — certainly NOT entertaining to a boy of 11.

Well, my theater-loving young actor Eli is not just any boy. And the kind of performances you find at this place are not just any puppet show. They are true entertainment!

I blogged about our first trip to the Center, about a year ago, to see Peter Pan. That’s when we were hooked. We went back in late November to see “Rudolph” and it was amazing, too.

Still, since seeing Rudolph, Eli had turned 11, ever more encroaching into that age zone where nothing I suggest is cool. So I wasn’t sure he’d say yes when I told him I’d been offered complimentary tickets again. But no — he was excited about going as I was. And once again, the performance did not disappoint.

The video clip above, while cute, really does no justice to the beauty of the set. We were a few rows back from the stage and it felt like being outdoors in the beautiful South. The highly-talented musical director performed as the narrator, sitting at a piano to the left of the stage. She also had a kick drum and other instruments to create various sound effects throughout the show. So it was like getting to watch a musical performance as well as the puppet show. The characters alternated appearing as their human and puppet selves, so we left feeling like we’d gotten to enjoy a play and a piano concert as well as fine puppetry. All of the actors had wonderful singing voices and real comedic talent.

It was fun for me to get reacquainted with the Brer Rabbit stories I remembered reading as a child. It was Eli’s first time hearing them, and their timeless appeal drew him in. (And left us pondering why it’s often the rabbit that’s the character who outsmarts everyone else? Was Brer Rabbit inspiration for the creators of Bugs Bunny?)

It was neat how they performed the story of the Tar Baby, though I think my favorite story was the one when Brer Turtle and Brer Rabbit schemed together to scare Brer Bear and Brer Fox with some simple tin plates and cups.

The show is running through May 26th, and is definitely worth a trip into the city. I give it two thumbs up — for ALL ages!