Imagination Exercise

After a long day last week, we sat down for an activity of comfort.

Stories.

This has got to be one of my favorite things.  Ever.

They bring a stack.

We get lost in it.

Later, I lit a candle, we gathered together and spun tales of our own as the day began to draw to a close.  

Benji told a story about his baby in his clubhouse (finding him there), Isaiah talked about seeing a bright red light in the sky followed by a sleigh and seeing a hat on top -- and getting a ride with Santa Claus.  Mia told a story that for the life of me I can't remember now.

I spun a tale of an old-time village in spring time: a time far distant (it seems) from the times we live in.  Without cars, without airplanes.  Horses and carriages.  An old time general store.  A cobbler shop.  A blacksmith shop.  Orchards and gardens and family breakfasts and working the land.  And about a beautiful orchard that burst into bright blossom in springtime, and a little tree in that orchard that didn't feel important or noticed because he wasn't nearly as big or beautiful as the other trees that surrounded him, until...

You get the idea.
Every time we do this, the kids beg to do it again.

It's All About Jesus

Yesterday morning we were across the street delivering a Christmas card to an older couple we love.

I was in the kitchen talking with Deon, and Mia had walked into the front room to look at the purple balls on their Christmas tree with Ralph.

He came back in and was chuckling as he told us what Mia had said during their exchange.

They must have been looking at the baby Jesus in the manger scene, because Mia told Ralph,

"There was a real baby Jesus, actually."

Tonight as I was tucking her into bed, she was asking me questions about Jesus.

Where is He?

Was he resurrected?

We discussed who Mary was, and then she told me that Joseph was Jesus' dad.

It was December 1st. 

I got to start something with the children that I've been anticipating for a couple weeks.

After dinner, we cleaned up.

I had them grab their blankies and pillows again.

 Each picked a spot.

We turned out the lights (except for the twinkles of the tree and mantle).

I gave them each a piece from a candy cane.

We lit the pyramid and watched the design it made on the ceiling.

And I read them the first chapter of Charles Dickens' The Life of Our Lord.

Dickens wrote this book to his children, telling them all about the Savior and incidents that happened in his life.

The room was quiet while I read.

Benji asked for more after we finished.

I told them that we'd read a little bit every night, before bed.  We'll light the pyramid while we read and snuggle up and listen.

One more way for us to think again about what this is all about.

Because, as Isaiah informed me while we were driving home looking at Christmas lights tonight, "Christmas is really all about Jesus, Mom."

We'll read more tonight.

I think this might be a new tradition for every December until the children are older.

I'm so excited.

Storytelling

Yesterday, while the kids were napping, after I'd worked out and showered, I climbed into my bed with my wet hair in a towel turban on my head and read this book.  (The same book I'm referring to in this post.)

I read what she wrote about taking time for storytelling with your children.

Not the kind that's in a book, but spinning tales from your imagination, and letting the children have that opportunity, too.

I was intrigued and decided to give it a shot.

After dinner, we had baths (including the boys giggling about their bare buns and me chasing them to the bathtub with my thumb and forefinger ready to pinch, saying, "I like to squeeze 'em, squeeze 'em!").  

Insert: giggling from the boys.

We straightened up.

Boiled water in the kettle until it began whistling.

Took it off the stove and turned off all the lights except for the Christmas tree and the twinklies on the mantle.

I told the kids to each grab their pillows and blankies and pick a spot.

Isaiah was on the floor.  

Mia and Benji were each in their own chair.

Benji went first, and told two stories that they have heard a few times over about my childhood/adolescence.

One about being burned by hot applesauce right off the stove at 4, leaving huge red welts on my neck and chest.

And one about skinny dipping with two of my sisters, in broad daylight in Southern Utah, on the 4th of July.

They love the skinny dipping one.

When Benji was done, Isaiah said he didn't have one to tell, so we came to Mia.

I wish I could capture this scene because it was so funny.

She began to tell the same stories that Benji had just told.

But when she got to the part about the applesauce spilling, she said that it spilled.

And then she said, "And it went down [and her hands were going from her neck to her chest while she was saying this] to her breath?" And she looked at me with that question tone in her voice.

The boys are at the stage where they think stuff is funny because they catch on to what she's trying to say now.

They start giggling, and I start laughing.

I say, "Breast?"

And she agreed.

I'm still not sure if she was trying to referring to breasts or chest.

The jury is out.

But it was hysterical.

Then she went on in her very detailed, descriptive, expressive way of talking.

Then I spun quite the imaginative tale of a elf named Twinkletoes that came to visit some children on Christmas Eve, who were waiting for the father to come home from purchasing candy canes to decorate on the Christmas tree for Santa.

Then we drank hot chocolate.

And I read them our second Christmas story, which was called The Popcorn Tree.

These kids are so fun.

I love coming to know them as people, not just as my children.

It is a privilege beyond measure.

It was one of those nights where I felt I'd done parenting right.

I love those nights.

Finding A New Story

I was browsing the Caldecotts at the bookstore.
Found this book.
I had never heard the story before.
So fascinating.
Frightening.
Mesmerizing.
Intriguing.
Make your jaw drop and gut surge kind-of-a-thing.
I didn't think it could possibly be true, but it is.

(this is the photograph from Amazon)

Yesterday the boys reminded me that we were going to try to see footage or photos or whatever of this. So we youtubed Phillipe Petit and watched this video. Amazing.

Went to Young Women last night with Mia in tow.
As we left the house and got out to the car to head to the church, Mia said to me,
"We're having a ladies trip."

She is oh so cute.

I'm Coming Back...

I've been gone for months.

We packed up and drove to Arizona for a couple weeks to get away from a long, wet spring (a repeat of last year).

Before we took off I planted my garden. I potted red geraniums on my back deck, in hanging planters in my back flowerbeds, in pots on my front porch, a hanging basket by my door. They speak to me in a signature sort of way.

I have nothing of real significance to say today. How does one catch up on a good lost four months? I will leave you with a couple stories.

This year we began something new -- something I had not anticipated the kids being into this early. We started the great adventures in chapter book reading. We began with The Lion, The Witch, & The Wardrobe and afterwards read Charlotte's Web. After finishing the latter, we were on the phone one morning to my sister-in-law to arrange plans for the next day. I let Isaiah hold the phone so he could say hello to her when she picked up the phone. While he was waiting for her to answer, he looked at me and said, "I'm going to say 'Salutations!'" And he did. Loved that.

A while back the kids were eating lunch and I asked how close they were to finishing their food and Benji looked at me and answered, "Eight inches." Well, hey.

Mimi couldn't be happier if she has a lipgloss in tow. And I'm not kidding. The girl loves her lipgloss, her toes painted, and anything else girly you bestow upon her. But she also loves the dirt and doing anything her brothers do. I hope it continues. She talks something crazy (ALL THE TIME), and we so love it.

I'm excited (and thankful) for summer ahead, for family, wonderful friends, faith, good books, talent, for something warm in my heart from one or all of these sources every day.

I promise to start posting regularly again. There's not any good reason for my long hiatus.

xoxo

Let Me Tell You A Story

Once there was a girl who made an uncharacteristically hasty home-life-changing decision.

She bought a dog.

And the girl who sold her the dog wasn't telling the truth, I am sure.

She told the girl who bought the dog that this little beagle was house trained, or all but. She'd just go to the door, howl, and you'd know she had to go out. This girl bought the dog (for what reason I honestly couldn't tell you now) because she wanted (Why, again? Why?) a house dog that was potty trained, calm, already through all the puppy stuff because she thought the idea of a dog would be great, but she didn't want all the training/babysitting/feeling like you have another child that a puppy would bring. Because she honestly couldn't handle that right now.

Well, you can imagine the rest.

The dog was peeing in the house. Put in the kennel because of the peeing. Let out because that is mean to keep a dog in the kennel all the time. Successfully peeing at times outside, but it was always a guessing game. Running off down the street with husband chasing dog in dead sprint to catch up and bring her back. And when inside and out of the kennel, going bonkers from being inside the kennel. And the girl was constantly stressed, trying to follow and watch this dog to prevent her from peeing in the house and take care of three small children and taking out the stress on her kids. What to do? Keep her in the kennel so she won't pee and be so mean to the poor dog (no dog should be confined like that)? Or let her out and deal with chaos in the house, messes, a quick puke up on the floor, and feeling stressed? The dog was obviously not house trained. The dog definitely knew where the door was after being in the house for a few days and being taken in and out several times a day.

The dog got posted for FREE on craigslist and the local newspaper's online free ad posting. Also texted the girl she bought the dog from to see if she had the phone numbers of, of course, all the people who had been calling on the dog the day before. And the reply was that she had erased all the numbers.

(REALLY? Doesn't work anymore, sweetheart, with the advent of cell phones -- and especially with that being the contact number you had listed on the ad. Pretty sure you could scroll back through your calls.)

No one called.

And the girl didn't know what to do because keeping the dog wasn't an option. The stress was too much and the girl had bought her thinking this wouldn't be an issue.

So what did the girl do?

I took the dog to the humane society and felt horrible about it.

I decided I could look at it and feel like a horrible person because the poor dog would be kenneled, or I could view it from the lens that it wasn't working at my house and at least this would open the door for her to get all of her immunizations and be adopted by a family that could train her and handle that -- because, if you took the potty issue out of it -- the dog was really cute and rather obedient.

(As a sidenote, the girl told me that the dog was up to date on all shots, but then couldn't surrender any paperwork to show that and handed me a rabies shot verification tag that wasn't even on the dog. So now after the whole experience I find myself wondering if she was feeding me a line about that. Why wasn't that already on the dog? It looks like it could have been an old tag. And then I think back now and think, "You're such an idiot...Hello! RED flag!!")

But that aside, I got there and walked back out to the car to get the dog and called Scott on my cell and started crying, feeling horrible and responsible for the dog being put innocently in a bad situation, and wondering if I was shifting responsibility from myself when it was my fault. The only way I felt even somewhat better was to know that their adoptive rate for small dogs was very high.

I still felt horrible. And still kind of do. I'm feeling a bit haunted by it.

But I came home and actually felt free in my own house -- I felt SO relieved. And felt sorry for the stress I had put my family through because I had been so stressed out.

And this is what I learned from the experience.

First...I will never do that again.

And second, I don't think I'm a pets person. Really. I like the idea in theory, I like the idea of a dog snoozing by the fire and all that jazz, but really...I don't think it's my thing.

This is how I became a complete (as opposed to partial much of the rest of the time) idiot for almost 72 hours.

$75 bucks of my saved birthday cash (now lost) taught me that over the weekend.

(And, if any of you live by me and want a big FREE bag of dog food, it's yours. Call me.)

For My Mother

Yesterday was Mother's Day.

I could tell you lots of reasons about why I've grown to love and appreciate my mother, not least because my appreciation for what she did for us kids has grown leaps and bounds since having my own. I haven't always been close to my mom, so being close and feeling close to her now brings me sheer joy; it is a gift that I treasure. But, that being said, I was reminded just yesterday of one of the things I most love about my mom. She just came home from a cruise, and my sisters and I all gathered at her house to get together before the oldest of us heads back to Boston. My mom was so thrilled to find us all at her house upon arriving home from the airport with my youngest sister. We ate pizza out on her deck, and I watched my little niece (in the picture below) do fingerplays with my mom.

It is always a sweet thing for me to listen to the way that my mother can recite many lines from memory of picture book upon picture book that she read over and over to us girls. She has fingerplays memorized that she did with all of us. It was a beautiful thing to see Daffodil stand right in front of my mom, and watch as my mother did these fingerplays with her, coaching Daffodil's hands to mimick her own -- helping her to "put her piggies in her trough," and line up her "soldiers standing in a row." That one was particularly tender to me as Daffodil put her little hands out in front of her, right up to my mom's hands, like they were mirroring each other through a pane of glass. (I wish I had a picture of this moment, and not just video footage, because that is what I would post here. But, as I do not, I posted a picture of my mom with all of my sisters and I above - so at least you can see her.) All of my sisters and I were watching, and when my mom would finish doing one of them with Daffodil, one of us would mention one that we remembered, and off she'd go, reciting the lines from years of use.

It is interesting to me now, years later, that the thing that I most remember and cherish about time spent with my mom as a little girl was all the time that she spent reading with me. I credit her for my love of words, of language, of stories. It didn't matter if we chose the exact same book over and over and over again, she'd read it with the same enthusiasm. I believe she loved the stories, too. It kind of reminds me of something I studied in one of my last English classes at BYU. We read Graham Swift's Waterland, and the thing that fascinated me most about this novel was the discussion of individual vs. collective history and the value of stories. To me, the novel asked the reader repeatedly to contemplate the value of stories and why we tell them. My favorite symbolism from the book was all the water -- the rivers, the sea.

"The Ouse flows on, unconcerned with ambition, whether local or national. It flows now in more than one channel, its waters diverging, its strength divided, silt-prone, flood-prone. Yet it flows - oozes - on, as every river must, to the sea. And, as we all know, the sun and the wind suck up the water from the sea and disperse it on the land, perpetually refeeding the rivers. So that while the Ouse flows to the sea, it flows, in reality, like all rivers, only back to itself, to its own source; and that impression that a river moves only one way is an illusion. And it is also an illusion that what you throw (or push) into a river will be carried away, swallowed for ever, and never return. Because it will return. And that remark first put about, two and a half thousand years ago, by Heraclitus of Ephesus, that we cannot step twice into the same river, is not to be trusted. Because we are always stepping into the same river." (Waterland, p. 145-146)

Robert Frost said in his poem "I Could Give All to Time": "I could give all to Time except--except / What I myself have held. But why declare / The things forbidden that while the Customs slept / I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There, / And what I would not part with I have kept" (lines 11-15).

To me, these words encapsulate Swift's idea of Time and History. He contrasts time vs. history. The hours and days pass -- that is Time. But History is different. Swift, like Frost, refuses to compromise the idea that we lose the stories, the actual experiences that have happened to us. While the minutes vanish, the defining moments don't.

(Consider this quote from Elder Maxwell: "There are certain mortal moments and minutes that matter -- certain hinge points in the history of each human. Some seconds are so decisive they shrink the soul, while other seconds are spent so as to stretch the soul.")

But, as I was saying, the furtherance of History hinges on the stories being retold, to make purpose and sense of life. This is what I love about stories: the connectedness that comes through them. It's interesting to me now that what I most love and remember about all the time spent with my mom was this love of stories that she instilled in me. Ironically, years later, I consider myself one who is obsessed with time and its cyclical nature.

I find myself thinking about the fact that although I never met my great-grandmas in the flesh, I know something of their life. In some small way, I am living it. I may not know what it is like to live on a farm or work the land in that sense, but I know a small something of raising children, making good food, rocking babies and singing lullabies and striving to strengthen my family. I feel uniquely connected to these women that have gone before, these mothers that have shaped my motherhood. This role tangibly links us together in my own heart.

I am so very grateful for my own mother. It is because of her that I already read to my infant sons, because of her that I will teach them the fingerplays, play folk songs on the guitar and sing with them, take them to swimming lessons and go and get ice cream after a trip to the doctor's office. I see reflections of her in my own actions every day. I love her - and so appreciate what she instilled in each of us. And I am moved as I see that linking us as women back through the generations of time, weaving us together as mother hearts.