Nobody mentions the mess

Some of my favorite books and plays when I was growing up were about large, crazy families with lots of people doing lots of interesting things. I couldn't get enough of them. (I, one of two children, also fantasized about living in a large family, but that's another post all together.) Think You Can't Take it With You. Even as an adult I am still drawn to the same genre. One of my favorite books to read aloud is Surviving the Applewhites. I love reading about a family (albeit a slightly dysfunctional one) where everyone has special interests and pursues them with abandon. It's very similar in fact to You Can't Take it With You, except that everyone is competent in their pursuits. (And it also has the "let's put a play on in the barn" theme. Someday I'm going to have a get a barn so my older children and their friends can put on a play.) I'm pretty sure that all of this reading has strongly influenced my parenting.

I do love to see my children engaged in activities that they find interesting, and usually I'm happy to support them. I also love that usually they are able to entertain themselves in unique and creative ways. I consider it a good day when children have been busy doing things they find interesting. However... at no point in any of the books I read growing up did they mention the wreckage left in the wake of people intently engaged on pursuing their interests. It's as if in the fictional world, there is an invisible mess fairy which follows everyone around cleaning up after each of the characters. And I want one.

Because the trouble is, children who are engaged and interested in play and projects leave a trail of flotsam and jetsam behind them that is fairly significant. And then when you multiply that by 10, well... where's that mess fairy?

I don't really think I would trade a pristine house for all of the projects and activities. I find them all too interesting. (And truthfully, I am in a little part responsible for some of it.) Some day the messes will get picked up... I hope.

What are some things going on around here? Well, there has been the gardening, of course, with the piles of brush and the very large stumps. I have hopes that someone will be inspired by those stumps, make some fantastic piece of art with them, and we can sell them for great gobs of money. I hint, but this is not a project anyone has taken on. So they sit in the driveway. M. is home for the summer and with her comes big projects. She is once again creating large-scale dinosaur puppets for a local theater's production of Jurassic Park. This is mostly confined to her room, but it does spill over a bit in that whatever M. is making is exactly what TM wants to be making. (He admires her greatly and bases a lot of his own projects on hers.) I have set aside a large piece of cardboard for one of my own projects and he is starting to badger for it... because he really needs to make a dinosaur with it. I've cut a deal that he can have whatever I have left over. I better get on with it soon, or I may lose the cardboard battle.

Yesterday found me vacuuming up huge piles of sand from the front hall. Several children yesterday morning were suddenly overcome with the need to fly kites. This involved rummaging through the house searching for various kites and then taking them down to the beach to fly them. A terrific activity until later in the day I realized that when the kites came home, so did half the beach.

Add to that the usual prolific drawings created by L., Legos, the piles of cars that K. leaves everywhere, more Legos, piles of books, science experiments in varying states of completion including a tooth in vinegar sitting on my windowsill, still more Legos, much dirt (or mud) tracked into the house because the bare spots where the grass has stopped growing is really terrific for driving all those cars in, boxes of games that were never returned to the cupboard, pieces of pretend games that K. has made so that he can play games like the big people do, large sticks that have been turned into slingshots and bows and arrows with varying rates of success, but which can all stand in for swords in a pinch despite the fact that I have stated that all sticks must live outside, A.'s weather alarm which goes off every time the weather changes, yet more Legos, dirty baking things strewn around the kitchen from impromptu cookie making sessions. And that's just the past several days.

I realize it probably sounds like most families homes. At least I hope it does and that we're not just an aberration. Yet I will admit that sometimes I wish everyone would sit quietly and not get anything out once in a while. I mentioned this to J. last night and then said that if I plunked them down in front of the TV all the time they couldn't make a mess. He replied that the mess would be in their heads and would be a lot more difficult to sweep out. He's right. I just have to focus on the happy and busy and try to pretend we're a family in one of the fictional stories that I love so much.

And if we're a fictional family that means I get the mess fairy, right?

You can't take it personally

One reason it is good to have friends and mentors who are ahead of you in their parenting journey is that you can reap some of their wisdom. The title of this post is my good friend's favorite tip for surviving parenthood, especially as children get older. It is also great advice for parenting adopted, trauma-injured children. You just can't take what they do personally.

Because 99.9% of the time what your children do or say or how they act really has nothing to do with you and everything to do with what is going on inside their head at any given moment. When we take personal offense at whatever rudeness or misbehavior or upset we are seeing, we have put ourselves in the center of something where we don't belong. Usually the upset child was not even thinking about the parent, but was thinking about something else. The parent comes along and BAM! receives the unpleasantness because they are convenient and safe.

But each of us lives in our own little world inside our own heads and it is terribly difficult to get over ourselves. Everything is about each of us, isn't it? At least it often feels that way. And the minute we do this, we invite misunderstanding and hurt feelings and a lot more drama into our lives. (I truly do not need more drama in my life, I don't know about any of you.) If I have learned one thing from parenting a child from a very difficult place it is to curb my default knee-jerk reacting. It doesn't help anyone, including myself.

Instead of assuming that the child wants to irritate me or is angry at me or want to somehow 'get back' at me, it is far better to stop for a moment and remember a couple of things. First, I am not the center of the universe. (It is somewhat embarrassing to admit how many times a day I do need to remind myself of this fact.) Just because I may be in the same room or even the same house as another person, that doesn't mean that the other person was thinking about me at all. Second, take a deep breath. Or two. Or ten. Really do it. I am not speaking figuratively here. Deep breathing releases serotonin which is the chemical that helps you feel calm and relaxed, plus it gives you some thinking room. If you're doing deep breathing, you can't say anything that you will later regret or that will escalate the situation. Third, now that you are somewhat calmer you can think rationally.

That rational thought needs to be employed as if you were solving a mystery. (Because, really, you are.) What has been going on in your child's life that could have led to this little unpleasantness (or not so little depending)? Children in their teen years need a lot of sleep. A lot. Has the child slept enough? Fatigue can make for unpleasant attitudes. (Trust me on this.) In this case, your only job is to remind the child that fatigue is no excuse for rudeness, point out that they are fatigued (they don't always know), and if you can, send them for a nap. The rudeness didn't have anything to do with you, yet if you respond as if it did, you escalate a problem that wasn't really there. This could be true for any number of scenarios. Did the child have a fight with a friend? Did they get their feelings hurt? Are they worried about something?

Even if it does have to do with you, such as a child who is angry that you have said no to an activity, it is still nothing to take personally. The child is angry and disappointed at not being allowed to go, but this anger says nothing about who you are as a person or a parent except perhaps that you are a responsible one and capable or making hard decisions in the face of disappointment. There is no need to enter the arena of upset and join in. Because it is not personal. And because it is not personal you can offer sympathy that the decision is disappointing, remind the child of your love, and walk away from the situation.

Now, if you are parenting a child injured from trauma, all of this becomes doubly difficult and doubly important, mainly because it really can seem very, very personal. But even if it seems this way, it still is not. This is one reason why therapeutic parenting can be exhausting. It is tiring to constantly remind yourself that what you are seeing really has nothing to do with you and to act (not react) accordingly. It is treating and loving a child the way he or she needs to be treated and loved and not they way their outward behavior would suggest. It is counter-intuitive. Because the child screaming they hate you is really the child who loves you and is so desperately scared by that they don't know what to do. Because the child throwing a(nother) temper tantrum on the floor is really the child who still does not have language to process what is going on and is scared and frustrated. Because the child who steals is really the child who feels so empty they try to fill it with something. Because the child who hoards is afraid of not having enough and running out. Because the child who is difficult to love has lost someone important already and it hurt too much. Nothing, and I repeat nothing about any of this has anything to do with the new adoptive parent. But they are handy and present. The behavior may be ugly or hurtful or painful, but it's root had nothing to do with you. It's hard. Really, really hard to not take it personally, but in order for your child to heal, it has to be done.

Remember, not the center of the universe, breath, think. And sometimes I just need to walk away to get some more coffee (or chocolate) every now and then, too. By the way, this is just really good for dealing with people in general, your spouse, your parents, your friends, your co-workers. Practice not taking offense, and your life will be lighter as a result.

Woefully lacking in pictures

I think it's been a week or two since I posted a single picture. Since my mother may start getting complaints from her friends, I need to remedy that.

Here is a big reason why there have been so few picture.

This is L. She does not like to have her picture taken at the moment. (If she is true to form, like other children in the family, this could last for the next 10 years or so.) I was trying to get a picture of G. and L. together in their new dresses that a friend gave them. Instead I got this.

G. is quite cooperative, though. A little too cooperative perhaps, because she has entered the 'fake smile stage' where the child tried to smile on purpose and ends up grimacing. Like this. (Click on it to see it bigger.)

This one is a little better because A. was making her laugh. Don't you think the two of them would have been cute standing together in their matching dresses?

I had mentioned that we have been doing a little gardening over here. I wanted to show you some results. Results that are still a work in progress, but still progress. Here is a picture of some of the brush we created from removing some of the ugly bushes. You'll notice that there are still some large bushes in the background that we hadn't yet hacked down in the picture, but they are no longer there. Multiply this pile by three more large bushes, add several yews, and two evergreens to the pile, transport it to my backyard and you can then imagine the pile of brush sitting there waiting to be chipped.

Here is the same section of yard, taken at almost the same place as the one above. All the bushes are out and our two new apple tress are planted. We still need to think about what we are doing with the plantings around them, but we'll get to that.

And here is one side of the front steps. That tree is called a Seven Sons tree (there is a matching one on the other side) and they are supposed to get flowers in late summer and then have really interesting back/seed color in the fall and winter. Now we need to decide about some shrubs to plant around them, but I'm really enjoying not looking at the overgrown evergreen bushes that used to live here.

In other house puttering, I cleaned off the side porch and made it look habitable again. I love this porch. It is one of the nicest places to sit outside.

And another view.

I've also been adding flowers to various spots. I'm tired of ugly, ugly, ugly and think flowers always help with that. Here's the playhouse (which I intend to paint this summer to freshen it up).

And the back steps.

We also cleaned the back porch and washed the windows on it. It helps some, in that it doesn't look like squatters have been living on it, but this part of the house is so ugly that really nothing short of demolition will help it. (Yes, I know the stairs look nice, but they are new. One of the carpenters who worked on the kitchen built them because he was so offended by the ugly steps that were there before.)

Of course, now that I have planted all of these flowers, I must water them. This has not historically been a great strength of mine... this watering business. I'm hoping that my miserly tendencies will kick in and I will water them just because of the amount of money I paid for them. This method of thinking has worked for me in other areas, I hope it will work for me in this one as well.

How Pictures Work

I wanted to share with you a little about the book, How Pictures Work by Molly Bang. It was one of many I checked out of the library when we began reading about writing books. I hadn't heard of it before, but it was in the right section, looked vaguely interesting, so on the stack it went.

A few days later, after having read the more straight-forward of the books, I decided to look at this one. I will admit that at first, I wasn't really sure about it. There were a lot of pages at the beginning about shape and color, which was vaguely interesting, but not really compelling. And then we got to the fairy tale. The author then takes some of the concepts she outlined at the beginning of the book and uses them to tell Little Red Riding Hood... using just shapes and colors. So Red Riding Hood was a triangle and her mother was an oval, for example. You have to trust me that it works. (I really wasn't quite sure myself when we started on that section.) What became fascinating to me and D. and TM (the only ones who could really follow what was going on), was how each shape and color changed how we 'read' and felt about the picture and the story. I recommend it if you have older grade schoolers on up and they are interested in drawing.

I didn't think much about it after that until I started to think about fairy tales and the quote from Vivian Paly. And I remembered something that I thought was interesting at the time, but was now seeing it through a new lens. In the section about Little Red Riding Hood in How Pictures Work, there is a page where the author takes the wolf (which she had made fairly scary on the page before) and showed how by changing one element (his eyes) she could make him look ridiculous instead. All of us enjoyed looking that the change, but TM really liked it. Really liked it as in he had to keep flipping the page from the scary wolf to the ridiculous wolf more than a few times. There was something that struck him as deeply satisfying about the change and even after we had put the book away, he would get it out again just to look at the transformation.

At the time, I thought it was just appealing to his color and design sense (which is very strong), I'm sure it was, but I also think it satisfied something deep inside of him. It was as if it was the glimmer of the idea that scary doesn't have to stay scary beginning to grow in him. I want to encourage this idea as much as possible.

We've been busy gardening this past week, so we haven't done a lot with well, much of anything else. We need to get back up on that horse in the coming week. I'll keep you posted.

There. One blog post written before 8:30 am, though I was really hoping for 8. It's a work in progress. It's been interesting to see how much real working time on the computer I need. If I want to write as well as delete/reply to emails, it is looking as though I will need to schedule an hour and a half each morning. I will say this whole no-computer-on-during-the-day-thing has had many positive benefits. I will need to blog about it soon. Don't be surprised if I start recommending the same level of unconnectedness to you. Which is slightly ironic since I write a blog which I will essentially be telling you not to read. A conundrum.

Enjoy your weekend.

Checking in

Things are fine here, but I know that some people start to worry if I go more than a day without posting. For a variety of reasons, we are completely revamping when the computer is turned on and I haven't quite figured out how to fit blogging into the new routine. Ultimately this will be a good thing for everyone, and a secure way to keep everyone safe as well, but it makes me realize how un-purposeful I have been about my own computer time. It also makes me realize how much of life... communicating with people, doing volunteer work, organizing people's activities, etc... takes place online. Long story short, if you want to reach me in a timely manner for the foreseeable future, use the phone. (And that would be my land line, not my cell phone which I rarely have charge and have a pay-per-minute plan.) Old-fashioned, I know, but there it is.

So, not to fear, life is fine, but it will take me a few days to work out the kinks in my plan. In the meantime, I'm kind of enjoying my unconnected life and the weather is too nice to sit inside anyway.

A little compulsive gardening

I might have mentioned that I am just a wee bit single-minded about projects when I gen an idea in my head. I don't think compulsive would be an over-statement. Often these projects involve things around the house. And when I do get a bee in my bonnet about something I want to do it RIGHT NOW. This is where you need to start pitying my husband, because these fits of mine are unpredictable. There has been more than a couple times when arrives home to major changes that weren't there when he left in the morning. Often when he left, there was no indication that these major changes were going to occur. For instance, there was the time that I decided that I absolutely could not live with the carpet which was in our front hall a minute longer, so I ripped it out. J. was a little surprised to arrive home to bare wood in the entryway and piles of hideous carpet decorating the edges.

Well, I mentioned yesterday that we are going to do something about the way our front yard looks and to that end, bought several trees. What I may have neglected to mention is that some fairly large and overgrown bushes needed to be cut down and their stumps dug out before the trees could go in. So that is what has been happening around here. It works out well that B. is as compulsive as I about pet projects and this is a project he can be interested in. He has worked like a dog today, planting the blueberry bushes, digging out two or three stumps, and taking down several bushes. I worked, too. Planting flowers in pots. But then, as I was looking at several of the large, overgrown bushes and noticing that the stump of one (which has yet to be removed), was already sprouting new growth (a good plant for me, as it seems unkillable). This got me to thinking that if we took down the entire row of scraggly, overgrown, and very ugly bushes to their stumps, then they could grow back and look better and be more manageable. And so we (TM and I) started. He is now pacing the kitchen waiting for me to get back outside while I write this and cook rice for dinner at the same time. We have managed to take down almost all of them, with one left which I think we can get done before dinner. The whole thing has created a crazy amount of branches, and I fear now we will have to rent a chipper to get rid of it all. It does really help the look of the front yard, though. At least it will once we drag the mountain of branches littering it to the back.

And, did you know that gardening is terribly dangerous? I nearly put my eye out and I didn't even have a Red Ryder BB gun. I was pruning back some smaller branches, leaned in to reach one, didn't see the pokey end of the branch and ran it straight into my eye. I was wearing sun glasses, though, and that deflected the branch a bit. For a moment I thought it had knocked out my contact lens, until B. started looking at me funny and I realized it was still there and after some blinking it moved back to the right side of my eye. I'm pretty sure that I will be sporting a nice black eye for a day or two. Maybe G.'s idea of wearing safety goggles as a fashion statement (they have them at Sunday School and she puts them on the second she enters the room) isn't such a bad idea.

Plant your garden

The front yard of the Big Ugly House has never been, um, beautiful. In fact, it fits under the 'big and ugly' category rather nicely. There are some things about it that I have detested for the 12+ years we've lived here, yet we still haven't done anything about them. Well, this is the year that we start to work on it.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that there are no new babies or children in the house this summer. I can actually think about it and have the energy to help. Next is that we had a little money left over from our tax refund (after spending the rest of it on glamorous things such as insurance and eye appointments and more insurance) and we decided that investing in our yard would be a good use of this money. (I am finding out that gardening is a very expensive hobby. I'm still suffering a bit from sticker shock.) Finally, I didn't want another 12 years to go by and still not have done anything.

This is a little silly, really, because the odds of us being in this house in 12 years are incredibly slim. The truth is, we just can't afford the taxes. (And trust me, they're a lot. When I tell people not from the area what they are, the stunned silence lasts for a good long time.) Yet we still don't have a really good plan in place as to what we should do. We've been in this limbo for several years and we are hopeful that it won't last another several years before we are able to formulate a workable plan.

I don't like living in limbo... that feeling of not wanting to do or start something on the house because we just aren't sure what the future holds. So I've decided to just live in the present and not try to figure out what is worth doing based on the amount of time I imagine we will have left in this house. To that end, we went to the local nursery this morning to pick out some fruit trees and plants. (I've wanted to grow fruit for a long time now.) We purchased some blueberry bushes, two apple trees, and two ornamental trees for either side of the front steps. (There is a lot of digging in B.'s future.)

Buying and planting fruit trees feels like a pretty significant investment in the future. I have no idea how many of those apples and blueberries we will be able to enjoy. But if we are still here in two years, I won't have to look back and kick myself for not planting earlier. And the whole thing is pretty Biblical as well. When the Israelites went into exile in Babylon, God instructed them to plant their gardens. Even though it was promised  they would return to Israel in the future, God wanted them to live in their current place without a temporary mindset.

We have no idea what our future holds, but for now, we're going to focus on the present and do things which are pleasing and good for our family. Such as planting trees.