Happy Birthday Sis!

Today is my sister's birthday! I hope she knows how much I love and miss her!

One of my favorite memories is from when I first found out that she was born, and that it was a girl. I remember being SO excited to have a sister (after having two brothers...) that I jumped up and down, and I screamed and hugged my grandma, who was there watching us.

I also remember giving her shoulder-back rides when she was just a toddler. And when she first started learning to talk, we would ask her all sorts of yes/no questions, and we would laugh and laugh at her answers, which were somehow always opposite of the REAL answer. (like, "are you a pig?" yes. "are you a house?" yes. "are you a girl?" no.)

Mostly I am just glad that she is my sister. Happy Birthday Tammy!

Quote of the Day

"I wish we had a hundred kids. Then we could have a bus."

and for the record, I'm not the one who said it.

Irony

I have decided that the process of serving dinner emphasizes one of the most ironic things of motherhood.

You see, I like the temperature of my food to be hot -- steaming hot -- hot enough that if I am not careful I will burn off the precious taste buds on my tongue.

But more often than not, things go something like this: I put it on the table. We have the prayer. I dish up the food for my starving and impatient kids. I cut up the food for the littlest ones. I then spend a lot of time trying to COOL DOWN their food, by adding ice cubes, blowing on it, or putting it in the fridge.

By the time their food is cool enough for them to eat it on their own, guess what -- mine is cold too.

Sometimes I try leaving the grown-up food on the stove until the kid food is cooled down, but usually, I just have to throw my whole plate in the microwave.

But food just tastes DIFFERENT when it comes from a microwave.

So how in the world is a mom supposed to have hot food, and the kids have cold food, and still have everyone eat together.

Maybe I just have to wait a few years until they've burned off enough taste buds to really appreciate hot stuff.

The Silver Lining

Despite the previous post, the only emotion I have been feeling all week is an overwhelming sense of how blessed I am.

* I'm so glad that ONE of the mercury things stayed in tact. I might not have EVER known that the house was contaminated.
* I am so glad that we didn't lose MORE stuff, and that as far as we can tell, nobody has suffered any ill health effects from having the mercury in the house.
* Just last week, I was thinking that I would like to get to know my neighbors better. There is nothing like two fire engine ladder trucks and a huge blue "Emergency Response" truck from the Department of the Environment to start a conversation.
* Those neighbors are amazing. I have had at least three people offer to give me their washing machines, and several have said that we can come over to their houses during the day. Everyone is asking what we need and what they can do, and I am amazed at how much these people who barely know us want to help.
* I have great friends and family who have showered me with love and pants.
* Most of all, as I read my scriptures tonight I was thinking about how these little temporal things compare to the eternal things. The greatest miracle of all is the one we celebrate during this season -- that a baby was born -- but more importantly that the baby grew, and died, and saved us all.

When It Rains, It Pours

Monday -- my husband left a mercury switch in his pocket. It went through the washer and broke, then through the dryer, vaporizing the mercury and contaminating our entire house.

I didn't even know about it until Wednesday night when I found the OTHER one in tact in the washer and asked him what this thing was doing in the laundry. (At which point he said, "Oh, no! There were two!")

The next morning Haz-Mat responders and firemen hauled away my washer and dryer and every item of clothing that has been in contact with anything I've washed this week. (Hello, I have FIVE kids, including a very spitty infant. Do you know how many garbage bags full of stuff left my house???)

I'm supposed to spend "as much time as possible" away from my house over the course of the next week, and whenever I'm gone, I'm supposed to turn the heater up really high, open up all the windows (in Maryland, where it is NOT warm outside) and turn fans on to circulate the air.

ALSO this past week or so -- my son broke his glasses, so we had to buy new frames; my other son ate a blow pop and dislodged the crown on his tooth; and the shower in the kids' bathroom started leaking water into my livingroom.

And to top it all off, my husband was fixing the sunroof on his car. He removed it to fix it, but then placed it back on top or the car while the glue was drying. Then he drove the car to go home teaching, forgetting that the sunroof was not attached. On his way home, it flew off the car and got run over by a bus. The glass shattered. And it has rained nearly every day this week -- into the car with no sunroof.

And when we got home from staying at my friends house all day (avoiding the mercury poisoning) we noticed that the bathroom sink's hot water shut-off valve is dripping water into the vanity.

Moral of the story #1: always check every pocket of every item you put in the wash, including those of adults who should know better.

Moral of the story #2: sometimes it's better to leave some of the laundry undone. Also, I am really glad I had not yet put away the "clean" clothes. If I had put everything away, we would have lost ALL of our clothes, because the "clean" clothes from this week would have contaminated the really clean clothes in the drawers.

Moral of the story #3: If your husband is a Ph.D. Chemist who chose to get out of bench science and do theoretical research, repeat moral #1 indefinitely.

Moral of the story #4: When it rains, it pours.

Dinnertime Battles (A long post with a desperate plea for suggestions)

I have a daughter. A very fun, but very strong-willed daughter. And she hates to eat dinner. OK, she doesn't hate to eat all dinner, just anything that isn't mac 'n cheese, chicken nuggets, plain cheese pizza, or hot dogs. So I try to have about one night a week when I serve something she likes, but the rest of the time, she just LOOKS at what I've prepared and declares that she doesn't like it.

I don't know if I'm just a bad mom, or a bad cook, or what, but each of my children has gone through a stage similar to this.

With my oldest, if he refused to eat at dinnertime, I would put the bowl or plate in the fridge, and he got it for breakfast the next day. Basically, he didn't get to eat ANYTHING until he ate what I'd served him. I figured that eventually he'd get hungry enough to eat it. And he did. At age 10, he is now a human food-eating machine who often eats more than I do, and who almost never needs coaxing in this department.

With my second son, I lost some will power, or else I decided that his shrieking was too hard on my ears, or maybe I decided I hated having little bowls of half-eaten food in my fridge. Whatever the reason, I gave up on trying to serve it the next day. But I was still strong on the point of them not getting to eat anything else that night -- no dessert, no other food or snacks, not even juice. The process took much longer, but then he got obsessed with eating "healthy food," and he realized through experience that having sauce on your noodles does not equate to having a death sentence. He even LIKES most of the food now.

But my now-5-year-old daughter is above any form of bribery or cajoling. She was fine as a baby, eating all the home-made things I served her -- until one day when I gave her baby food from a jar. Ever since that day, she refuses to eat anything new. It is as if I violated her trust that day, and I just haven't been able to earn it back. I have the same rules as with my second son, but she literally DOES not CARE! She would rather go hungry than even TRY the food.

As an example, on Halloween, my in-laws were here and served a San Antonio specialty of chili sauce on corn chips. I told her she wouldn't get to go trick-or-treating if she didn't try ONE bite. One bite. To go trick-or-treating!!! She refused. Several times. I was shocked. She even haughtily declared, "Well, I don't want to go trick-or-treating. I will just let the other kids go, and I will eat their candy when they get back." (The NERVE!) Anyway, she eventually ate the bite, and I even got her to eat the rest of her bowl once I explained that she wouldn't get to EAT the candy unless she ate all of her dinner.

THEN, last Monday we had potato soup. She DOES like MASHED potatoes, so I thought I might be able to persuade her to eat some. NO WAY. Absolutely refused. Without even trying it. I reminded her that she didn't have to eat it, but that she wouldn't get our FHE treat. "I just want to go to bed," she said. But then she kept insisting that she didn't like it. I told her that if she kept saying she didn't like it, she would HAVE to try one bite or go outside. And she kept saying it, so I put her outside and told her she had to stay there until she decided she could try a bite.

It was cold outside, and it was raining. I thought for sure she'd be back inside in under a minute. Nope. It took her about five minutes of crying and saying "I'm cold!" before I finally convinced her to come in and take a bite. But then she wouldn't EAT the bite because it included a potato chunk.

Back outside.

This time I took the bowl to the door and held the spoon there so that she couldn't come inside until the bite was eaten. She was crying and shivering, and I kept telling her that if she would just eat the one bite then she could come inside and get warm. Nope. Nope. and Nope. "Mom, I'm cold. Mom, I'm freezing. Mom, my hair is getting wet." And finally, "Mom, my fingernail polish is coming off."

It was a LONG time before she finally took the one bite and came inside to get warm. I looked at my husband and noted that if she is this unbending NOW, about a bite of soup, when she's hungry and supposedly freezing, then I can't even imagine what she will be like as she gets older. I just wonder if I will have enough energy to match that kind of determination.

Incidentally, though, ...

This past week, she begged me to make potato soup. Yes, begged. Maybe it was worth it???

Oh, and after some cajoling she also ate Tuna Casserole. (I successfully convinced her that the breaded top would taste like a chicken nugget, and that the rest would taste like a tuna sandwich.) She even had seconds -- and thirds -- after originally declaring that she would hate it.

So, DISH... (pun intended.) How do you get your kids to eat? Am I just mean for serving so much "healthy" food? Am I out of luck because they somehow didn't learn it when they were younger? Do I just wait for her to outgrow this one? Am I damaging her delicate self-image by occasionally forcing her to try new things?

Oatmeal in Your Hair

My mother-in-law came to visit us a couple of weeks ago, and in the course of laughing about all of the craziness that comes with kids, she told about a speaker she heard long ago. Apparently the speaker jokingly told the women (more or less) that the most important part of motherhood is to make sure that, before you walk out the door, you check to make sure you don't have oatmeal in your hair.

In the past week, this has become much more meaningful to me.

First, there was one day when I was cleaning up lunch and realized that I had sat in the same chair my toddler had used for breakfast, but I guess I failed to notice the oatmeal he had spilled on his chair, because I found it all over the seat of my pants. But not in my hair. And I didn't actually walk out the door that way.

Then came Sunday.

This past Sunday my husband woke up early and went to his leadership meetings at the church. I woke up with him, began my personal scripture study, and refreshed myself on the Sunday School lesson I would be teaching that day. When I was finished reading, I put my head down -- just for a minute, I thought -- but promptly fell asleep and woke up much too late to be able to make it to church on time with five kids.

We scurried around getting everyone ready, and made it there about five minutes late. There were no seats left near the back, so we ended up having to walk all the way up to the second row, dead center, where there was a row with enough room for all of us.

We hadn't been there five minutes when the baby started crying, so I took her out, again walking past everyone in the entire congregation.

I sat down in the mother's room, where there was already one other mom caring for her baby. She looked over at me and remarked, "You know, you have a band-aid on your skirt." I looked down, and sure enough, there was my son's used band-aid, stuck to my red skirt, not camouflaged at all.

So, um, yeah -- I went to church with a band-aid stuck to my skirt. I think I might have been better off with oatmeal in my hair.