I’ve been a slacker on the Darndest Things lists lately. Last month’s wasn’t close to complete, but I suppose a bit is better than nothing at all. We also had some challenges lately: weird issues in E.’s health, A. deciding she has her own ideas about rules, etc. Some parts of life aren’t cute, and though I share fairly openly around here, the Darndest Things section is primarily for cute.
22 August 2006: Boys are Smelly
E. has a fondness for lotion. One upon a time, he had a really bad scrape on his knee, and we put a special lotion on it to help accelerate the healing. He has generalized this experience so that he now seems to believe that all lotion is equal, and should be spread liberally on every bump and bruise. The other day, he came out of his bathroom smelling like a woman. I investigated the bathroom to determine the source, and, sure enough, he had generously applied some of my Bath and Body Works ginger-scented lotion to his recent injuries!
20 August 2006: Bossy Baby
That lovely Sunday evening I described on the 6th? It really was just a glimpse. A. was very precocious this evening and we ended up in the “Cry Room” together, rocking a bit. The only other mother present in there had a 2-week-old with her. Though A. refuses to obey me when I shush her in church, she was quite comfortable shushing the newborn! The poor new mother! I felt terrible. Her baby would cry, and little A. would keep hissing at him!
20 August 2006: Early Bloomer??
E. at the end of a long-winded description of his morning in Sunday School: “…and the girls were beautiful!”
18 August 2006: Mother’s Helper
This morning, A. broke one of her favorite rules: “Do not touch the fireplace.” I was absent for all of thirty seconds, so naturally she took advantage of the situation. The baby monitor was still on, and I heard someone open her door, so I went to check it out. E. was taking care of everything! He went into her room and got baby wipes, and by the time I arrived, he was already carefully using wipes to clean the soot off of her hands. He told me that he would take care of everything, and headed over to the closet, got out the vacuum, disassembled and reassembled the vaccuum so that it would have the proper attachment for the job, and vaccuumed up the pieces she has knocked to the floor. What a big boy!
8 August 2006: Chalk Drawing Theology
Whenever Si tries to explain theological issues to E., he tries to use a drawing. He thinks it helps when describing the abstract. One of the things he has repeatedly drawn is a heart, which he colors in to show that it is full of sin. {Later, he will erase it out as he explains that Jesus cleanses the heart and makes it new.} So, today when my sister-in-law was drawing a heart on the sidewalk with him and colored it in, he told her she was drawing a sinful heart!
6 August 2006: Warm Sunday Evening
I’ve mentioned before that we take our kids to “big church” with us. Our church has a number of different services, and the one we attend with our children is the evening service. We find that a lot of the families who want to worship together attend that service, so we feel our children are much more welcome in that particular service.
It must be mentioned that taking children to church involves training, and lots of it. It is not for the faint of heart. The children will appear to have finally “gotten it” and learned how to behave, and then one or both of them will suddenly start over at square one. I am sure when they are older, these difficulties will be a distant memory. But for now, I sometimes dread church because it is “hard.”
But tonight was different. Finally. A. made it all the way through church without too much fuss, and E. behaved the way I knew he could if he only put his mind to it! And in that moment, it all paid off. There we were, children in our arms, singing hymns and other songs, together as a family. The months of grueling Sundays became brought us a short harvest of joy.
I don’t pretend that next Sunday will be the same, but this merciful glimpse of what is possible in time was enough to keep me persevering!
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