This post is either for other moms of young kids or for women who’d like a reminder to be vigilant with their chosen method of birth control. You’ve been warned…
There was a day, long long ago and far away, when I dreamed of having a lovely family full of children to raise. I believed that Perry and I would have a home with laughter, deep conversations, and lots of hugs. Originally, we thought we’d have four, but after I was so miserable with the first pregnancy, we cut that down to two. With twins the second go round, we were up to three. Then, with divine intervention and a lack of prevention, number four came into our home. The dream was complete!
We’d have kids who played together and laughed a lot. He and I would craft their childhood to give them strong spiritual training, a worthy education, and protection from the hard things in the world, at least until we could help them interpret it. We’re still aiming for this.
So why do I feel like I spend all my time holding back the tide of kid junk taking over the house, and acting as referee for silly kid arguments? This isn’t what I thought I’d be doing as a mom, at least not this much!
And let me tell you something else. When people say that having kids is expensive, they need to be a little more specific. Anyone can imagine that having kids will incur some expected costs: clothes, shoes, food, diapers, high chairs and strollers, child care. No one ever told me that the natural destructive tendencies of children would cause me to need to pay for things I’ve already paid for, like our backyard fence. Oh yeah, my kids spent time climbing up and over our fence so many times that after enough rain, the supports weakened and our fence fell into our neighbor’s yard. More than a thousand dollars later, we now have a repaired fence.
My kids also like to crush things into powder, like bricks and lumps of clay they’ve dug up in the backyard. If they were sentenced to hard labor, they’d keel over and die, but they do this for fun in the backyard. I still don’t know who figured it out, but some kid realized that the dirt in Georgia is mostly clay. So they dug it up, dried it, beat it into powder, mixed it with water and made tiny clay pots out of it, which they dried in the sun. Then they went in my school supply closet (yes, without asking!) and took paint to decorate their creation. So now we have crumbly little pots in random locations in the house and yard.
Recently I instructed them to make cards to go with their teacher appreciation gifts at the end of our school year. They were told to go to the basement craft table and use construction paper, crayons, markers and colored pencils for these creations. Someone (they won’t tell me who exactly) decided to get the fabric paint left from a birthday party craft and use that to make the cards. Not only were the cards heavy and sticky and took days to dry, but all my expensive fabric paint was gone at the end of this crafty incident.
They also like to do dangerous things. My middle daughter was sitting at the top of closed bleachers without a railing after church the other night. I almost had heart palpitations! We also had a neighbor stop by our house to inform us that they had found our three oldest kids perched in a tree that was leaning precariously over the lake in our neighborhood. The tree had started to lean after one of the big storms in the past year, but all the kids could see was an easy place to climb and hang out. Any adult watching envisioned the roots giving way and the kids being dumped into the water with a tree falling on top of them.
Yes, they were in this tree…
Another time they went off bike riding with their five year old sister and climbed another (upright) tree. The baby couldn’t get up, so they pulled her up with them. Of course, she also couldn’t get down. That led to another conversation, educating them about the limits of a five year old. I actually was glad they wanted to include her, just concerned about their lack of judgement. Remember my post about the five year old and her head injury at the unwitting hands of her brother? Oh, the plight of the youngest!
Maybe this post made you laugh because you have (or had) young kids who performed their own shenanigans. Or maybe you’ve set an alarm on your phone to remember to take that pill every day. Personally, I wrote this one so I won’t forget. Any of it. You know, it amazes me how fast the time is actually going by, even though it often feels like I spend the days picking up stray socks and turning off abandoned lights. I only have 7 years left with my oldest before she goes to college! And one day, my house will be quiet and neat and I probably will miss all the chaos of these days, even if I don’t believe it now. But I don’t want to forget about the backyard pottery, or the fabric paint cards, or the sugar free cakes they’ve baked for me. These are my babies, this is my family, and this is my life. And it’s a good one!
What about you? Any special memories you want to be sure to hold on to? Please share in the comments below!