Category: Parenting
A season it has been
If you keep up with me on The Twitter or know us for reals, you know that the last few months have been packed with calamity.
Calamity of all flavors.
I’ll fill you in with stories over the coming weeks, but to give it to you in broad strokes:
- my sweet Mema died in March
- we sold our house
- we bought a house
- we moved
- the baby showed up early for the terrible twos
Gosh, when I put that stuff in a tidy list like that it doesn’t seem all that overwhelming. Anyhow, more to come, but I just wanted to drop in and let you know we’re surviving.
A quick tip for when your child gets hurt
If your kids are real, live oxygen-breathing kids and not robots, they will find creative ways to destroy their bodies.
And more to the point, they’ll find creative ways to destroy their bodies at inopportune times.
For instance, two years ago our oldest child gashed her eyelid just as we were putting the finishing touches on a nice long weekend – in the mountains an hour out of town. Not to be outdone, our son split his head open this past Christmas Eve.
If your number hasn’t been called yet, just wait. It’s coming.
For that reason, I want to share with you a little nugget of parent wisdom that we (following the example of our kids apparently) stumbled into accidentally:
Buy red washcloths.
The reason you need to do this is because when your child knocks a tooth out or gashes his head or nearly severs his finger or skins his knee or whatever it is, there will be blood. And if there’s one thing I’ve noticed about kids, it’s that they’re not soothed by the sight of their own blood.
That’s why it’s so hard to settle the kid down when you try to stop a bleeding wound with a clean kitchen towel or white washcloth – because every time you pull the cloth away to have a look, the kid is thinks the place looks more and more like a crime scene.
Enter the red washcloth.
The red washcloths are stored in a central location away from everyday use. They go with the bandages and neosporin.
The red washcloth allows you to keep the wound covered without the kid noticing that it’s wicking away any gore. Only a really sharp kid can see his own blood on a red washcloth.
When your child is hurt, there are enough variables to contend with already, so keeping him/her from freaking out about seeing their own blood will help tremendously. Try the red washcloth.
What learned-in-the-trenches first aid hacks do you have to share?
Fighting against the quick kiss goodnight
She’s seven now, and she’s an artist and a bookworm, so I’m just one of a few big things competing for her attention.
At bedtime, by the time I’ve got her brother all settled in his room, she’s miles into a chapter book. The image of my daughter relaxed against her headboard, blankets covering her legs, with her book resting on her propped-up knees is sweet to me.
It’s so easy on the nights when I’m tired to kiss her forehead and pretend I’m doing her a favor by giving her some time alone to read and then say goodnight.
The labor is getting into her attention, making a connection, valuing her with time, presence and focus.
So I fight the part of me that could so easily make a habit of the quick kiss goodnight. I sit with her and tickle her and hug her and ask her questions about school and her friends. I plant seeds that don’t make a lick of sense to her now, but that hopefully in the future will allow me space in our relationship to speak words she needs to hear.
Wednesday wisdom
How is it Wednesday already?
Even though the past week has flown by, I’ve still had a few minutes to read some good stuff. Here are a few of my favorite posts from the week:
Five plus yes by Shaun Groves. This is a very cool story about what happens when “your ability meets someone else’s need,” to borrow a line from the post.
Abandon crap by Kent Shaffer. My little daughter the artist gets so frustrated when her work doesn’t turn out perfectly the first time. I tell her that she gets closer to the work she wants every time she “messes up” but she doesn’t believe me. When she’s old enough for the word “crap” I’ll certainly share this post from Kent and the embedded clip featuring Ira Glass from This American Life.
Reverse judgmentalism by Pete Wilson. To whom do you find it most difficult to extend grace?
Who is one blogger who has made you think this week?
Four tips for better relationships with your kids
When our son was born, we had a nurse who liked to give what I would call “unconventional” advice about how to care for him – stuff that she’d learned simply by being around a lot of babies over the course of her career.
You know you’re in for something good when your nurse starts a story with:
“You won’t find this in any medical textbook, but…”
And when she said those things, I knew she was either 100% right or 100% insane. No middle ground.
I like her approach enough that I’m going to steal it and use it here.
You may not find this in any parenting manual or psychology textbook, but I have a theory about young kids: Kids will establish how they relate to you forever based on how you relate to them when they are very small.
Here’s what I mean.
If my son learns at five that I laugh at him/fuss at him/ignore him when he brings me what he thinks is a problem, how much communication is likely between the two of us when he’s 15?
Based on this idea that kids will solidify how they relate to you when they’re small, here are a few notes based on what I’ve seen in my life:
1) Be a receiver. I’ve posted about this before. My goal when my kids start a conversation is to keep them talking and draw out what they’re saying as much as possible.
While I was driving Son home from school the other day, he said, “Daddy, I like Saturdays.”
I asked him, “What is it that you like about Saturdays?”
I kept drawing things out of him and eventually he told me that he likes Saturdays because we’re all together as a family.
Made me glad I didn’t just say, “Me too,” or “Yeah, but Saturdays can be really busy sometimes.”
2) Lose the sarcasm. Mary Craig and I like to think we’re pretty funny people. Sometimes when one of the kids says something, I’ll reply sarcastically. Kids don’t speak the language of sarcasm. Getting a laugh off my kid while they’re trying to talk to me is cheap. I think they don’t know, but they know.
3) Remember they’re kids. Kids have kid problems and kid fears. They celebrate kid stuff and cry about kid stuff. Their reality is their reality. I think kids feel disrespected or diminished when you don’t recognize that their stuff is real to them.
4) Be mindful of what they really want from you. What I mean is, answer the question in your mind, “How would I want my mom or dad to react in this situation?”
If I hit a homerun on the tee-ball field, I’d want to hear my parents cheering the loudest in the stands. If my friends picked on me all day, I’d want someone to love on me. If I brought them a problem I’d created, I’d want them to listen without reacting harshly.
That’s not to say it’s my job as a parent to always give my child what he/she is wanting from me, but I think being mindful of them is the best place to start.
Like I said, you probably won’t find those in any textbook or parenting manual. So like our nurse, there’s a chance I’m 100% insane with this.
But if I’m on to something, and the preschool and kindergarten years really are when you begin to set patterns of relationship and communication for the later years, what would you add to my list?
Wednesday wisdom
I thought I’d share a few good things I’ve read recently:
Let’s go CRAZY in 2011 by Missy at It’s Almost Naptime. This is pure inspiration and motivation, kicked off with a story that’s sounding more familiar as we get deeper into our adoption process.
Bring new light by Hugh MacLeod at gapingvoid.com. I love Hugh’s work and this cartoon and post were especially inspiring. Go check this out.
Who are you going to offend? by Mark Batterson at Evotional. I liked this post because there’s part of me that wants everybody to be happy all the time. But sometimes you have to decide who’s going to be happy and who’s not.
And finally, check out Laws Concerning Food and Drink in The Atlantic. My friend Erica linked to it on The Facebook earlier in the week and it’s hilarious. Dripping with truth.
Got anything you want to share?
This is why I need Christmas
When the kids were finally tucked in bed and Christmas 2009 was in the books, I pulled a black trash bag from the cabinet and started in the direction of the living room. Waiting for me were the remnants of the day’s activities: boxes, bows and torn-up wrapping paper printed with words like, “Peace, Love, Hope.”
Mary Craig was in the kitchen washing dishes from our big Christmas Day meal.
“This is why I need a savior,” I told her.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because none of the stuff that Christmas is about is happening inside of me right now,” I explained.
After 36 hours of Christmas festivities, I was tired and sad and frustrated.
You know how when you get a haircut the stylist will hand you the mirror and then turn you all around so you can see yourself from every direction? For most of the day, that’s what God had been doing with me.
He showed me what I looked like when I let my greedy, prideful, selfish heart call the shots. It wasn’t flattering.
And that’s when He told me, “This is why you need me. This is why you need a savior.”
I need a savior because my heart is a mess.
I need a savior because even though I can smile and be polite to your face, I’m resentful and jealous and proud inside.
I need a savior because I measure how much you love me by how much you give me.
I need a savior because I remember more about what went wrong last Christmas than I remember about the moments we shared with our kids.
Have you ever been there? Have you ever found yourself in the middle of something that’s supposed to be happy and fun and memorable and it just…isn’t? Have you ever made it to the end of Christmas and felt like something wasn’t right about what just happened?
Mary Craig felt that weight too.
We had actually both felt it for years but just didn’t know how to put words to it.
Talking about it at some point later, she put it this way, “It’s all too much.”
All the shopping, all the cooking, all the wrapping, all the delivering, all the spending, all the getting…it’s all too much.
In years past, our way of handling that feeling would have been to encourage each other not to stress and to pray for better attitudes. The hope being that feeling differently about it all would make it all different.
This year, things change.
This year, we’re making things different in the hope that we’ll feel differently as we make our way through Christmas.
What are we doing?
First, we’re giving up one Christmas. On Mary Craig’s side of the family, the buying stuff just so we’ll have stuff to unwrap is gone this year. Instead, we’re taking the money we would have spent on her mom, sister and brother-in-law and giving it to the nonprofit of their choice. They’re doing the same for us. That’s how it works for the adults this year.
Second, the kids shopped for gifts in the World Vision catalog. In the same way they got to sit and make a wish list in the Target catalog, they got to circle items they wanted to give to families in the far corners of the world. This is the first Christmas that chickens and goats have been a part of our shopping experience.
Third, we’ve declared Christmas Day a pajama day. The big, Thanksgiving-style meal that we normally produce has been shelved in favor of a breakfast casserole in the morning and a pot of soup in the evening.
“The best gift I can give my kids is a mommy who isn’t a basket case,” Mary Craig said. She’s right, so we’re dialing down the pace and intensity of Christmas Day. Being more present is going to be part of our present to our kids this year.
These are relatively minor changes, but when you start monkeying with family traditions, minor things become major very quickly. We’ll see how it goes.
Our intent with all of this is to turn this thing – even if it’s just by a few degrees this year – back toward God.
My hope is that when I sink into the sofa cushions at the end of Christmas this year, it’s not because I’m burdened by the weight of what God has shown me about myself, but instead that I’m filled and resting in what God has shown me of Himself.
Adoption: Choosing the gender of your child
One of the crazy things about adopting a child internationally is that – while there are no guarantees – you have a great deal of say in the type of child you’re getting.
What I mean by that is, on the application you to specify the age and gender of the child you’d like to adopt. Beyond that you can designate your level of willingness to take in a child with special needs or a severe illness.
It’s interesting.
One of the things Mary Craig and I had to nail down in the initial stages of our application was whether or not we were going to request a boy or girl – or if we were just going to leave it in the hands of the agency and the folks on the other side of the world.
Our decision didn’t come quickly or easily. Our thought is that we’re probably best set up for a girl, since we’ve most recently had a girl baby. There are plenty of girl baby clothes around here, etc. If we were led to check a box on the form, it would most likely be the “girl” box.
But as we continued to look over the form, we were overcome by all the conveniences we were being afforded by the adoption process that biological parents aren’t. After all, when MC was giving birth to our three kids, we didn’t get to decide whether or not they would have special needs or a severe illness.
On the subject of gender, we felt certain that our decision should be to not make a decision.
In the case of our adoption, someone else gets to decide if we have a boy or a girl. Just the way it worked when MC was pregnant with our three babies.
Some gems from a once-lost notepad
“He took some pretty awesome notes.”
That’s probably what my epitaph will read. I take a lot of notes.
I take notes in meetings and during sermons and while I’m reading books.
One consequence of my incessant note-taking is that I have lots of notepads with lonely, forgotten notes on them scattered around our house. Mary Craig found one of those notepads the other day while she was cleaning out a closet.
The pad had two pages of notes on a book I read on 2007.
“These are awesome notes,” I told MC. “But I have no clue what they’re from.”
All that’s there are page numbers and my notes, which are probably excerpts from whatever the book was. Anyhow, since I thought the content of the notes was pretty good, I thought I’d share:
All love is work or courage; not all work or courage is love
Attention is an act of will against the inertia of our own minds
Listening to kids:
- forbid the talking
- permit the talk but don’t listen
- pretend to listen
- selective listenting
- truly listening with attention
balance of all five is necessary
The type of listening – and the amount of true listening – is the best evidence of worth you can give your child
The best way for your kids to feel valued is for you to value them
Benefits of listening to your child:
- provides concrete evidence of esteem to your child
- the more valuable your child feels, the more he will say things of value
- you will realize your child has valuable things to say
- the more you know about your child, the more you can teach
- the more your kids feel valued, the more they’ll be willing to truly listen to you
this is a cyclical process
Adolescents require less total listening time, but a greater concentration of true listening
The need to be listened to by one’s parents never goes away
Listening as “love in action” is especially important in marriage
Other forms of attention are game-playing, reading and homework
The quality of attention is proportional to the intensity of concentration during time spent with kids
See? Pretty good stuff. I wish I knew who wrote all that stuff so I could point you in the direction of that book, because it’s worth your time to dive deeper into it.
What about you? Are you a note-taker?
The 4:00 p.m. meltdown
When Daughter started kindergarten last year, Mary Craig noticed an unusual wrinkle in her behavior that developed.
Nearly every day, Daughter would have a meltdown about something. She’d get in a tiff with her brother. She’d pitch a fit about having to do homework. You name it, she’d find a reason to for there to be friction about it.
We could count on a meltdown every day at around 4:00 p.m.
It threw us for a loop for a long time until we finally figured out what was wrong: she was exhausted.
I had forgotten about all that until a few weeks ago when I saw a post by Dr. Meg Meeker talking about the same thing.
If you’ve got little ones starting school for the first time or bigger ones not yet in the rhythm of a new year, let me encourage you to read Dr. Meeker’s post. I think it’ll save you a lot of frustration. Here’s the post:
