The Ministry of Silliness

With preschool aged kids around the house, I'd say our lives are a mix of the sweet, sour, and silly. Lately, we've been in high friction mode with a lot of "That's my toy!" and "But I was playing with that!" followed by "Waahhh!!" Drives me nuts, but also makes me more aware of when the house rings with laughter and cackles. It might only be for 30 seconds, but it's gold.

This week, I've been meditating on Hebrews 4:14-16, particularly this idea of approaching God's throne with confidence.

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.~Hebrews 4:14-16

In the text, this confidence appears to rest in two things: first, that Jesus has ascended to heaven as our great high priest, and second, that Jesus lived our human life and "gets" it. An Old Testament high priest offered sacrifices on behalf of himself and the people of Israel for their sins. But the blood of animals had to be offered regularly to cover sins. Jesus, as the high priest, offered himself as a sacrifice not on his own behalf, but on behalf of all humanity for all time. So that's one part of our confidence, that in Jesus, we are expiated, our sins have been paid for and do not prevent us from coming before God's majestic throne.

The other part of our confidence is supposed to be in the fact that Jesus walked the earth and lived human life and can understand our weaknesses. I'm making a bit of a leap here, but I think this works out in all the language used to describe our new relationship with God as one of adopted children.

For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry,“Abba, Father.” ~Romans 8:14-15

Yesterday, we were out at a big birthday dinner, and our kids were at one end of a long table happily into all the sprinkly condiments. There was salt and pepper getting shaken out, there was sugar and pepper, pepper in water, sweet n low and who knows what. The parent-self wanted to chastise them for doing it wrong. But the kid-self remembered all those grown-up dinners my brothers and I attended where we entertained ourselves in the same way albeit Chinese style: tea and soy sauce, tea and chili paste, chili paste and mustard and green onions, and so on.

As I think about this and I think about approaching God's throne of grace with confidence, I think this confidence we're to come with is not the confidence of triumph and ability, but the confidence of relationship. It is like the confidence my children have that we find them delightful, that we are after their good, that we desire to help them*. In this, I think we need to spend more time meditating on Jesus' call to have faith like a child.

*We do have punchy parent moments where we screw this up.

Grace: The mini play

INTERIOR CHURCH -- PRESCHOOL ROOM -- LATE AFTERNOON

Andrea slumps against a wall with a box of blocks after two hours of wrangling a particularly defiant Beatrice. Beatrice holds a yellow block and stares at toys. Cathy plays in the kitchen set in the corner.

ANDREA

Beatrice, put the yellow block in the box or we can go out into the hall again. 

BEATRICE keeps playing for a moment, then walks over, puts the block in the box, and twirls away.

ANDREA

Beatrice, that was great! High five!

BEATRICE stops mid-twirl to come back for high five.

BEATRICE

I love you! (Throws herself in Andrea's arms)

ANDREA

I love you, too!

CATHY

Even though she does bad things?

ANDREA

Even though she does bad things. Because Jesus loves us even though we do bad things.  

Lent for Protestant Kids

It was surprisingly difficult to find stuff for Lent for protestant kids. I didn't grow up with Lent, but it's become more popular in evangelical, protestant circles. I'd like to think this is partly because people are moving deeper into a life-long apprenticeship with Jesus as Dallas Willard calls it. Anyways, I won't go speculating.

I did pick up a Catholic book several years ago, but as I was looking over it this year in preparation for Lent (which starts March 5th this year), there are too many thing I'd need to explain as "this is a Catholic thing and not something we hold dear to". For example, I think in the Ash Wednesday reading there's a bit about thanking Jesus we've been baptized into the kingdom. Except that we didn't have our children baptized as infants (I'm less and less opposed to this, but we just didn't).

While I'm doing this, let me just say that "liturgy" and "tradition" has generally gone over like gangbusters with our kids. We have morning and evening prayers. Yes, we do the same prayers/songs everyday, but the kids know the prayers and it's part of the rhythm of our day. The Lord's Prayer in 2 year old garble is adorable.

For Advent we starting putting up a Jesse Tree 3 years ago, and the kids have enjoyed listening to stories and putting ornaments up on a little Christmas tree we kept from our apartment years. This past Christmas we added something my in-laws dropped off which is a clothesline that we clip a new name of Jesus to each day. Kids loved it.

But back to Lent!

Here's what I've found so far:

Family Devotions for Lent
Best for age 4+
My favorite in terms of simplicity. Each day has a scripture, a prayer and a question

Lent Activities for the Family
Best for age 3+
Fun activities and reflections through Lent

Lenten Devotions
Best for age 3+
Works like a Jesse Tree; has a printable ornament and matching scripture. You can easily print out, color, and hang one each day. About half way between the first two in complexity.

Trail to the Tree
Best for age 5+
Laid back (only 17 days) and artsy, this one is from Ann Voskamp of One Thousand Gifts fame

Once we figure out Lent, I'm thinking about how to incorporate a Catechism into their spiritual education.

Toilet Training

Dear Children,

You may wonder when you're older what it was like for me to earn my Ph.D and quit working to be a stay-at-home-mom in the same year. Well, it was hard. In my social circle, it wasn't done. In the larger society, people were writing articles about how women who received advanced degrees and did not remain in their profession were failing women at large. Even without that, it was hard simply because the life transition was so enormous.

So I want to tell you about an experience I had when I was younger which helped me make sense of this sudden change.

My first summer in college, I was in a training program that included  a communal bathroom  for 16 girls. We were put in teams of four. On the morning of my team's turn to clean the bathrooms, I found myself scrubbing toilets while my teammates were still sleeping. I was a very bitter camper.

I huffed my way through the toilets, the shower stalls, and the floor. Then I started on a long row of sinks. Somewhere between the first sink and the last sink, I realized that while everyone else was asleep, God was watching, that these were God's sinks, and that He was pleased. No one else had to know. I didn't need to snark at my teammates.  The bathrooms were cleaner, and this was something I could do for God's glory.

In the years since then, when I've found myself doing stuff I don't like or value (or others don't value), I've been able to turn back to that bathroom experience. It reminds me that seen or unseen, valued or unvalued, my doings can be a "spiritual act of worship" and God sees.

So those years when you were small and needed a lot of "unseen" care, I remembered that God saw and his value of what I was doing with my life meant more than anything, certainly more than faceless article writers. (This also meant I didn't have to welcome your dad home with a boring recounting of all the wonderful mom-things I'd done that day.)

Anyways, as you grow up and face the twists and turns of your own life, remember that God sees and cherishes you, and that you don't need to live for the pleasure of anyone else but Him.

And about you and me: it was hard; you were worth it.

Love to you both,
Mom

The gear and the goods

So recently our church changed the translation of its pew Bibles which reminded us that we needed to figure out what Bible to get our children which reminded me of what the point is.

When I was learning about photography, I stumbled across this phenomenon where some people love photographic gear more than they love making beautiful pictures. They get huge thrills out of the engineering of the thing that makes pictures, that's their interest. And that's great and it takes up a lot of pages on the internet, but it's not photography. It's gear.

I did my senior thesis in college on Bible translation, and I'll say that for 99% of people any Bible translation done by a committee is fine. The issue, particularly for the big English Bible translations, isn't which translation? The issue is do you read the Bible? For 99% of people who are thinking about picking one translation over another the only question that needs to be answered is, "Will I read this?" The 1% are people who study the Bible. And honestly, for people who study the Bible, they need many translations including the Greek and the Hebrew.

So if you love the King James Version because Grandma always read to you in the KJV, if that's what'll keep you reading the Bible, read the KJV. If you are a nerd who likes awkward phrasing that reminds you that you're reading a translation from Greek and Hebrew, knock yourself out on the New American Standard (NASB) or English Standard Version (ESV). I'm a nerd, I like those versions too. If you gravitate to a version that's more like what you encounter in everyday language there's the New International Version (NIV) and the New Living Translation (NLT). Biblegateway.com and The Bible app are great places to review the same passage in many translations. Pick the one that you're ready to read a lot of.

Currently, I'm doing my daily Bible reading from a devotional called Seeking God's Face (my review of the book). I didn't even know what version I was reading until I looked it up today. Wouldn't have been my first choice (TNIV), but it's still be a great resource for daily Bible reading.

A second consideration is what are your friends reading. If you're in a situation where you're reading the Bible with other people, depending on the circumstances you might want to have the same version they do. Alternatively, you might be in a group where it is beneficial to have a few different translations on hand.

From there, onto children. For our kids, I'm looking for a sturdy Bible with large print that is easy on young eyes. That would be my primary criteria except that these are my kids. So it would be also nice for my kids to use the version that we're most familiar with and the version that I did most of my scripture memory in.

This is where things become tricky. I have done almost all Bible memorization from an out-of-print version of the NIV. It went out of print two years ago, before my kids started reading, before I knew to care about this. So now I'm stuck between learning verses with my kids in a new version or hunting up old versions of the NIV on ebay. What a pain.

If you're not in my boat, I would probably recommend the latest NIV version because it's a nice compromise between oddly contemporary and oddly archaic. (And it's in print.) If you want to see some kids' Bible verses in different versions, here's a pdf of Awanas verses for 3-4 year olds.

Treasure!

Something I've documented here is that my transition to mom-life has been rocky. But in a recent conversation with a new mom, I realized how far along I've come. I see my children as treasure, not stumbled-acrossed treasure, but hunted treasure.

The kids are now 4 and 2 and I'd say it took three years to come to this. I think a lot of it was sleep deprivation. We spent most of those first three years crazy tired. Another part of it was the radical shift for me from academic life to home life. And another piece was the developmental stage my kids were at.

At their current age, my kids are able to express themselves; their wants, needs, their highs and their lows. With practice, I'm better at listening, but they have also grown into better communicating. They are becoming their own persons with their own personalities which are distinct and different.

They are so much more independent. I have to make excuses to pick them up because their fine on their own two feet. Fine and FAST. They can and do find things to amuse themselves and for extended periods of time. And they can be more or less trusted not to kill themselves. They have the sensibility that outlets are not for play, that little pieces shouldn't go in the mouth, running in the street is a bad idea -- what a relief.

The bickering they get into drives me around the bend, but I can empathize. I sure did a lot of fighting with my own siblings in my day.

Both of them also had minor but significant health scares in their first couple years. Significant in that these issues had to be attended to. Minor in that we weren't dealing with cancer or something more nebulous requiring loads of doctor and therapist visits. So on this side of things where we have their health sorted out and are adjusted to their various food restrictions, wow are they precious to us. Wow are we grateful for good health.

We have two healthy children who run around and do kid things, who marvel at the world, play with passion, cry with greater passion, who fight and hug and kiss and make up, who jump up and down in excitement about anticipated wonders like grandma and grandpa visiting and waffles and going to the park.

People talk about loving their spouse more after many years together, but somehow mothers are supposed to fall in love with their child the first moment the lay eyes on them. I'm sure it happens for some, but for me, I am much more able to cherish my kids today than when I got them. They are treasure to us.

Early Reader Books, Part 2

Well, I should get on with Part 2 of my Early Reader series.

Our reader renewed her interest in reading about April and April through June was working through pre-reader and "Level 1" books. Although, as I mentioned before Level 1 was actually a pretty hit or miss "Level". So the rest of the summer to now, she's been comfortably cruising "Level 2" books and some "Level 3" books as the mood strikes her. For most of this time, I've been checking out stacks of books and giving her 2-4 books a day. I try to throw in some non-fiction, but she hasn't been interested. My approach is like my approach to vegetables, I set them in front of her and hope she'll eventually try some.

Anyways, here are our favorite series from this summer.

Cynthia Rylant has created many series of early readers, of which we really liked three: Henry and Mudge; Annie and Snowball, and Mr. Putter and Tabby. I liked them because the language seemed well within reach for our reader. She liked them because she liked the characters and that there were more books about those same characters. My only quirk about them is that all the characters from top to bottom are Caucasian when ethnicity is incidental to the stories. Would have been nice for a few of the characters to be illustrated as something else.

Another series we liked involved the antics of Cowgirl Kate and Cocoa. Yes, another human-animal relationship but at this point, anything that maintains reader interest and isn't otherwise awful is quite nice.

 Longer than the previous series mentioned, Cork and Fuzz by Chaconas are two animal friends who get along like the Odd Couple. Initially, the greater length made our reader sigh, but now she takes them on with aplomb.

Honestly, by the end of the summer we had exhausted the library branch near us. So lately, I've been over to another branch not too much further away and have been happy to have a new set of books available. As always, I would love more recommendations for good early reader books. 

Early Reader Books, Part 1

As a Zoobean curator and mom, I'm always on the prowl for a good kids book. For me, I'm looking for good art and an interesting re-readable story. And then our oldest started learning to read.

Early reader books were nothing like the "good" kids books I had been looking for. This is a very different, transitional stage for the child who benefits from a restricted set of vocabulary. The art tends to be ok to bad and the stories are seldom worth reading more than once. That said, here are resources that were helpful to us in the early stages. It's not exhaustive, it's what we liked most from what was available to us via the library and recommendations from other moms. If you've come across some resources that have been helpful, please leave a comment!

1) Bob books

We got these used from another family, and it kicked things off for our oldest. I see them often at Costco. The vocabularly is well controlled in each book providing focus and practice on particular sounds.

2) Starfall.com 

Another resource we learned about from others. Our oldest really liked the site and picked up the lessons quickly. It's got a 90s website vibe to it, but most of the site is free. So free and engaging, can't really beat that.

3) Mo Willems

Of Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus fame, Mo Willems's early readers from Cat the Cat to Gerald and Piggie have a remarkable ability to convey a lot with a very small, repetitive vocabulary. Gerald and Piggie, in particular, get caught up in antics that are quite entertaining and have a relationship reminiscent of Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street.

4) Dr. Suess

It's easy to forget that these well-loved classics are also early reader books. They also do a lot with a small, repetitive vocabulary while adding elements of rhythm and rhyme which provides a lot of practice for the early reader but they are usually much longer than Mo Willems' books. Requires some stamina to make it all the way through.

5) Jon Scieszka's Trucktown

Zany characters with fun illustrations, these tend to be very early reader books and have been fun for both our reader and younger not-yet-a-reader. Granted, our not-yet-a-reader is a bit truck obsessed.

6) Olivia (Ready-to-Read Series)

It turns out that Olivia is a Nickelodeon character in a television show of the same name. I didn't know this when we came across her. These early readers have nice illustrations and more interesting stories than most.

In the details that matter

I got to see a college friend's mom today. I first met her something like 15 years ago. She asked how my family was doing. What do you say to that? It's been crazy, intense, and filled with gems of goodness.

There's my dad's cancer thing. Currently, looking less and less like cancer. But along the way, tremendous support from his church and medical professionals at many institutions.

And by the way, my mom was the first one we contacted about helping us after my surgery. THANK GOD she turned us down because of their previously planned trip for a 2 month stay in Malaysia. The week before the Malaysia trip is when all this crazy cancer stuff hit the roof. The two of them have been such a team wading through a 100+ medical articles to figure out what questions to be asking regarding my dad's test results.

There's my shoulder surgery. Unexpectedly, my mother in law came instead of my father in law and stayed 2 full weeks instead of a week after my surgery. A huge help in many ways especially since it took me most of 2 weeks to get back on my feet. Church folk, neighbors and even a lady from the gym have been delivering meals. Some single ladies from our church small group have been coming in the evenings before N gets home from work to help me feed the kids and bathe them. Also huge.

And Sunday, my nephew unexpectedly arrived in the world 8 weeks early yet healthy. My brother's family life has been turned upside down but in the details that matter, they are doing great. Baby CJ is breathing on his own, doing well and my sister in law is also fine. Again, wonderful help from their church friends providing meals and helping with my 2 year old neice.

Jesus talks about coming to earth so that we could have life abundantly. When I'm running late while sweating in the summer-that-won't-end while trying to buckle my kids in their carseats with just one working arm, I'm not feeling the abundance of life. I want the thermostat to turn down, I want my kids to cooperate so I can get the car going and the AC running.  

But when I think about life, how my family is alive and healthy, I am so grateful. I count these moments of alive-ness where my kids pick up every stick and twig and feather, where my niece meets her brother in his isolette, where my dad waves to us over skype, and I collect them in overflowing abundance because in the details that matter, we have been graced with abundant life.

Planning, plans, change

So our summer 2013 is at about mid-point and warrants some review.

Going into the summer, here were my thoughts:
1) Let's go visit family in Seattle
2) Encourage my daughter's interest in drawing
3) Play outside in the mornings before it gets hot

In other words, we were looking at a very open ended, unscheduled sort of summer. We've been able to do the list: We had a great trip to Seattle. My daughter has been drawing and crafting her heart out. And the kids get time outside at a park about 4 times a week.

What we weren't planning on doing was buying a house across the street for my parents to retire into. Since they won't be retiring for a few years, we needed to rent the house in the interim period. That unexpected project has taken up a fair amount of summer energy. We got the renters settled in July 4th weekend and have been recovering since then.

Although somehow recovering has included hosting a neighborhood barbecue. That was fun, but not exactly restful. But it was supposed to inaugurate a peaceful, boring denouement to the summer ending with Labor Day weekend and the kids returning to preschool a couple mornings a week.

Well, at a routine visit to my family doctor last Friday, we were talking about my insomnia and how my injured shoulder would flair up making falling back asleep difficult, and one thing led to another, I saw my orthopedist and I have surgery scheduled in 3 weeks to fix it up.

That compresses the summer.

Since 2009, it seems to be a family pattern for us to putter around in our day-to-day routine and then turn on a dime and race off in an unexpected direction at full speed. I'm not sure what I think about that. I mean, I'm thrilled that we aren't usually frantic people who then shift into turbo-crazy. I think maybe part of us wishes we had longer stretches of puttering. But we have actually been really good at shifting gears and directions and doing that together. I think these changes push us out of our comfort zone into God-seeking mode and that's not bad either.

At some point I should look into the fall, but at this point, I'm just trying to figure out what needs to be done for the family the first month after surgery.

Vacation 2013

Well, we just wrapped up a week-long vacation visiting grandparents and assorted other relatives in the Pacific Northwest. It's the best trip we've had since having kids.

The best part for the adults was probably the sleep. We got 8-10 hours of uninterrupted sleep most nights. That's a huge win.

For the kids, who are 2 and 4 now, we slept through the night because they slept through the night. Big change from our last trip when the little one was 7 months old. We used VRBO.com to find a mother-in-law apt which was furnished with a kids table and chairs. The kids loved that and having independent eaters was another nice feature of this trip. L's favorite thing to eat on the trip was probably the "doughboy" which was an 8 inch long donut in the shape of a gingerbread man. She finished it off on one sitting along with some lemon chiffon cheese cake.

I think we ate a month's worth of sugar and sweets in a week which was part of what made our vacation a vacation. Grandparents really enjoy ice cream, so the kids got a lot of that. Their house also has a fire pit, so s'mores were a great excuse for getting that going frequently. D practiced breaking up sticks just like Grandpa. It was really cute to watch.

We saw 3 sets of aunts & uncles from both sides of the family, a rare treat.

One fun thing about the trip is that the mother-in-law apt was in a basement which was pretty dark. We were really concerned about that long summer days up north, but staying in a darker basement meant not only did the kids go down to bed well, but that we could keep the whole family on Central time. We never time adjusted. With little kids, we hadn't scheduled evening activities anyways. They went to bed about 5-6 local time (7-8 home time) and we went to sleep about 7-8 local (9-10pm home time). Sure the kids got up early for local time, but there was a wonderful park nearby so we walked them over there and let them run out some wiggles if we didn't have anywhere to be.

Plane rides were meh. The kids were probably as good as it gets, but crazy tired kids with tired parents is a difficult combination any way you look at it. Schlepping 2 car seats on and off the plane is always it's own clown car show too. Maybe on our next trip, our oldest might weigh enough to just use a small booster seat. We'll see. That'd be cool.

Our last previous vacation was late 2011, more than 18 months ago. It was grueling with D only sleeping every other night. So it was really nice to have a different, better vacation this time.

Fatherly wisdom

Back when I lived under my dad's roof, he would have occasion to notify me of life's seasons, particularly that families with young children had to make different choices than at other time of life. Of course, in my infinite, teenage wisdom, all of life was exactly as I was experiencing it and all decisions I made were good ones.

Now that I have my own family and it's got young children in it, boy, was he right. Seasons. They're such an apt metaphor for life. Here in my part of the world we have two seasons: April to September is ReallyHot. October to March is QuiteNice. ReallyHot is taking off and QuiteNice seems like a distant memory and a faint dream. But truth be told, QuiteNice will come again.

Yesterday morning, I melodramatically flopped myself on our bed and announced that I was done with this life season of DemandingDependence. I had been awakened by a mewing child several hours earlier and asked to help wipe a nose. That in turn awakened the light-sleeping sibling. [Gnashes teeth, tears hair.] I could not see out of our season. And honestly, I am probably more often convinced that DemandingDependence is a permanent state than a passing season.

But just the notion of seasons is hopeful and that's despite the fact that we have really long ones here. One recent summer we had 100 days over 100 (or something very close) and somewhere after day 79 it just felt like we would always be house bound and it was always going to be ridiculously hot. But the weather did break, and I did run for a sweatshirt around 80 degrees.

I don't know what it is with my tendency to think thing will "always be this way". I slip in that direction readily. But the metaphor of seasons reminds me that no matter how long and how grueling (or great) a season is, life rolls on and it rolls into a different season.

Broken but not hopeless

In reviewing a lot of children's books over the past year, I've been saddened by the messiness, grossness, the evil that my children need to be exposed to.

Today, I was coloring with my daughter and introduced her to coloring skin. We used a peachy pencil, and a dusty tan pencil, and a brown pencil and we talked about how people had different color skin. And we compared our arm colors, and we talked about other children she knew who were darker than she was. And it was just a fact. To her, it's like daddy has blue eyes and she has brown eyes. 

But we've read a number of books that share about the American history with skin color and how it wasn't so factual. One thing I've been impressed about a number of these books is how exuberant they can be in the face of evil. I'm thinking about books like Hallelujah Flight which tells about an early trans-continental flight by 2 African-American men or Willie and the All-Stars about a boy growing up during WWII who wants to play professional baseball only to be told he won't ever because he's the wrong color.

We've read a couple books about children with limited access to books and the librarians who trek miles to help them. That Book Woman tells the story from the 1930s of an illiterate boy in Appalachia who learns to read over the course of  the visits from "that book woman". The book made me cry. Waiting for the Biblioburro also talks about an itinerant librarian but is set in contemporary Colombia. The burros are charmingly named Alpha and Beto. Our house is filled with books, and our children are unlikely to experience the privation these books refer to. Yet they need to know. They need to know that it's not so easy in most of the world and hasn't been for most of history.

But I also want them to know that their circumstances do not define them. That's something I so value in the children's book genre; they are by and large hopeful. Though these none of these books are grounded in a theology of hope, I think the hope is there because in Jesus there is the truth of hope. In the Easter story, where Jesus dies and defeats death, the darkest hopelessness, hope gets teeth. It's not just wishful thinking. Evil doesn't win the war even if it wins a few battles. 

Our nighttime routine with our daughter is to read a devotional with her, pray some set prayers, and then we ask her, "What can we thank Jesus for today?" Lately, she's wised up and tells us "Everything!" so that we can get it over with and get on to reading a library book. While we do help her unpack what her everything is, I hope she can also see the truth of it, that we can be thankful for everything and in being thankful we are hanging on to hope regardless of the circumstances. 

Praise-alluia

No cystic fibrosis! Booyea!

The Grace of Ducks Askew

A few weeks ago, Brennan Manning passed away. He's the author of The Ragamuffin Gospel and a number of other books that have been influential in my life. One of his last books was entitled All is Grace which I haven't read. But last week, I mulled over that title. All is grace. Is that true? Do I believe that?

As a couple, my husband and I are "ducks in a row" kind of people; we like to have and work toward having our ducks in a row, getting things that should be done done. While our ducks were never actually all in a row, since we've had kids we've gotten more ducks and more of them aren't in a row. And that bothers us, and we complain about that.

So what I pondered was, "Can my disorderly ducks be a gift from God?" And the answer is of course, yes.

Some people are actively aware that the order in their ducks is because of God's active grace in their lives. Like our friends who are in a pinch but have been able to pay down some medical bills because of, to make a long story short, God miracles. Ducks brought back into a row because of God. Awesome. That, however, is not us.

We would prefer to tell ourselves that we have aligned our ducks and that if we tried hard enough we could get them perfectly aligned and when we did that, God would have to smile on us. This is our tendency although when we talk in terms of ducks it's easier to see what a lie that is.

So this past Friday, we went in for a second cystic fibrosis test for D. The first one didn't collect enough sweat to test. So we've been in limbo these past 2 months wondering if CF is the reason for his lack of weight gain. We're hoping this new test gives us a clear answer one way or the other. Turns out. for other reasons, that whether this test is positive or negative we have to see a specialist for another thing. And the Friday test only produced marginally more sweat so we might get a no-test again.

D's health and development is a break-dancing, purple-plaid duck that is not playing nice with any of our other ducks. And this uncertainty is in fact a grace in our lives. As much as I think it is a deep grace that we are ducks in a row people who know our neighbors, pay our bills and have 529s for our kids, D's break-dancing, purple-plaid duck reminds us that God is not grading us on our ducks.

Instead, each duck is a gift, one we get to care for, one we are empowered by God to care for. Whether they are orderly or dancing out of our control, God already smiles on us and already knows what we're going to need.

In my spare time...

The last six months or so, I've been curating children's books for Zoobean.com which will be open to the public in mid-May. Here's a blog post I wrote for them on some of our favorite illustrators:

Sometime during the seven years I trained as a linguist I went from a world-traipsing museum-goer to a life of words, words, and more words. Oh, and the occasional gesture and eye-gaze.

In my new life with little ones, I've been reintroduced to visual art and have encountered some wonderful artists disguised as children's book illustrators.

Here are a few artists that have stood out over the past 600-odd books we've looked through.

1) Zachary Pullen
We first encountered Pullen in The Toughest Cowboy: or How the Wild West Was Tamed. This was a fun book, but Pullen's art was better than John Frank's story. So I hunted for other work by Pullen and found Friday My Radio Flyer Flew which he authored and illustrated. Home run! (Speaking of which, he's also illustrated Lipman Pike: America's First Home Run King.)

Pullen paints wonderfully detailed caricatures from frequently odd, close-up angles that invites the reader. young and old, to enter into the world of the book.

2) Jane Dyer
We first noticed Dyer in Talking Like the Rain: A Read-to-Me Book of Poems. Her watercolors paired so well with the thematically arranged poems.

Then, browsing in the non-fiction section of the library we came across Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Cookies: Bite-Size Life Lessons. Rosenthal uses cookies to define abstract terms like modest, fair, and content. Dyer's watercolors of children and animals complement Rosenthal's text in a way that provided a context and opportunity for me to discuss important concepts with our four-year-old. Because she's starting to become aware of ethnic and linguistic differences and her own ethnic heritages, I also appreciated that the children depicted were from a number of different ethnic backgrounds.

3) John Himmelman
Himmelman's extensive experience observing and documenting the natural world is obvious in his renderings of animals. As my father-in-law commented about Chickens to the Rescue, Himmelman has perfectly captured "chicken-ness" on every page. The antics of the thirty-odd chickens are so engaging even my two-year-old frequently dumps the book into my lap for another go at them. We've read several of Himmelman's other children's books, but this is our hands-down favorite. This summer, I plan to take a look at his non-fiction "Nature Upclose" series.

In my late teens and early twenties, I chased down the abstract paintings of Kandinsky and Malevich, and as much as I enjoyed that, it was sort of a personal quirk and definitely a solitary pursuit. In these children's books, I've been able to share the experience of beauty and truth with two little people I love. It's fun to have them point out what they notice, eg. my two-year-old always points out the upside down chicken in Chickens to the Rescue, and for them to remember things we talked about the last time we read the book. One day I'll introduce my kids to Kandinsky and Malevich, but for now we're having a whale of a time with Pullen, Dyer, and Himmelman.

Outliers, part 3: Rolling with it

Our son is a bona fide outlier in terms of his weight. He's got good motor and cognitive development for his age, but he hasn't really been gaining weight for the past year. Working with his pediatrician, we've kept an eye on it and kept giving him time to add some poundage, and it's never come.

So in February, we did a round of initial blood tests. These showed no reason why he wasn't gaining weight. So our doctor wanted to next check for cystic fibrosis. I have done very little reading about the disease because the name sounds so scary. But my understanding is that cystic fibrosis could be preventing him from absorbing the nutrients he needs to grow.

We went in for this test which measures the salt in his sweat. But he didn't sweat enough. So we're going to need to go in again which we'll do at the end of April. We could have scheduled earlier, but February was too full of tests. We all needed a break.

I think that people see positive outliers (those smarter, faster, taller, etc.) and think, man wouldn't that be wonderful and aren't those parents so lucky to have kids like that. And there are some great things about such a situation, but also some draw backs -- like what kind of bed and what kind of clothes did 7ft+ Yao Ming need?

Then I think that people see negative outliers (those sicker, dumber, slower, etc.) and think, isn't that terrible and aren't those parents so cursed to have kids like that? And as we peer into the (hopefully remote) possibility that we will care for a son with an awful disease, I don't think my heart is processing things that much differently.

Part of it is my own mess, from part 1, where I grieve the loss of "normality" that comes with giftedness. So grief for smarts? Check. Grief for illness? Check. But we're in a place where we don't know for either kid. There are signs and symptoms that suggest that our daughter's intellectual development may be ahead of her peers, and there are signs and symptoms that suggest our son may have cystic fibrosis or some other disease.

For now, we have to live by faith that God is providing what we need for today. And for May, if we discover our son does have a dread disease then we will move forward trusting that God will provide for that occasion. And if, in a year or two or three, we discover one or more of our children are unable to flourish in their school, then we will move forward trusting that God will provide for that occasion too.

UPDATE: links to Part 1 & Part 2

Effort and faith

I think a lot about what's my part and what's God's part. Like when it comes to becoming a mother who is kind to her kids, what's my part and what's God part? Kindness is very hard to fake, in my mind. So it's probably going to involve an inward reorientation and that always makes me think of something God has to do.

Lately, the Dallas Willard stuff has been making me think hard about what's my part. Willard's model for change requires "VIM": Vision, Intention, & Means. What vision do I have about my relationship with my children? For starters, I want them to experience grace from me that they can hook up to the grace they've received from God. I can't imagine memories of their mom yelling impatiently at them is really going to help. As I understand it, by intention Willard means the focus of our will. When I come to the point of yelling or not yelling, will I force my will to override my emotions and choose kindness?  Means, in the case, the means are very easy. My vocal cords and lungs can modulate my volume and my tone easily. There's no physical reason why I have to yell.

This notion of forcing the will to override emotions is the most unnatural part of this to me. It feels a little godless, like all I'm going to do is muscle up and sit on my yell button so I can't hit it. But as I think about it, for my example, it's probably the place where I need to be most disciplined about calling God into the process. "God, help me to carry through with not yelling, with having an attitude of kindness."

I think I question the what's my part, what's God's part because God is so obviously more able. So why should I expend my puny effort or how can I believe  that my relatively puny effort will be necessary or productive? Here I think the answer is that I need to ruthlessly apply my effort not because it is big in God's world but because it is big in my world. My efforts represent my desire for "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." Is it more important for me to get my way, or is it more important for God's will to prevail, and surely his will is for me to be kind to my children? Who sits on the throne of my life? If I'm to allow God to sit on the throne and run my life then surely it's not surprising that I have to spend my effort to keep myself off the throne.

Lent: Giving up Contempt

It's that awkward time of the year again where Lent starts and I never know what to say, "Happy Lent?" That just seems weird.

Anyways, in brief, since I have dishes that need to be washed and a bed calling out to me, I've been listening to Dallas Willard's lectures on his book the Divine Conspiracy and one of this themes is a reading of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew chapters 5-7) as Christ calling us away from contempt, arguing that what Jesus does in those passages is redeeming the contemptible. I haven't read the book, but the notion has given me pause.

So for Lent, I'm giving up political news which always stirs up my contempt-o-meter. I've done this before with a general sense that my news addiction was unhealthy, but this year I feel I have a bead on the problem: when I read news, I'm not really just encountering information I'm judging and condemning. It's ugly.

Sadly, however, the news is really the least of my problems. What I have realized recently is that the object of my regular contempt is my children. When I get impatient and raise my voice, when I feel I can't take it any more, what has happened in my heart is that I am holding my children in contempt. So while Lent is frequently about foregoing something and I am doing that, this Lent, I want to dig in an embrace kindness and embrace my children.

Seeing differently

I used my recent birthday money to buy a new camera. The stock lens that came with it has a wide field of view (14mm, 28 mm film equivalent). Up until now, my favorite lens has been a zoomed in, portrait lens (85mm, 136mm film equivalent). I love being able to stand across the room and catch the private expressions of my kids doing their thing. I love being able to focus on little nuances. But that's not what a wide angle lens gives you.

With this new camera and lens, in addition to getting beautiful color which is why I got the camera, I'm being forced to see differently. This lens captures the background environment even when I'm inches away from my kids. So I'm finding that this lens is forcing me to tell situated stories, layering what's happening in the foreground with what's in the middle ground and background. Now that I have more than one child, this is become quite useful and more interesting. It's a lens much more suitable for capturing context and interactions.

The dramatic life changes I've experienced these past several years has also forced me to see differently. As excitingly diverse my fields of intellectual interest were in graduate school, my life was extremely contained in specific spaces with specific kinds of people. Now as a new-ish mom, in a new neighborhood, mostly out of academia, I'm encountering a much broader variety of people, something I didn't expect when I moved out to the burbs.

I have relationships across more socio-economic strata and education levels than before; high school graduates with solid middle class incomes, college and post-college educated folk on the poverty line, the more usual college educated, middle to upper-middle class, the blue collar lower-middle class, etc. As I get to know these folk, life gets more complicated and less complicated.

More complicated is how people navigate their worlds: health care, government services and bureaucracy, family and friend obligations and needs. Things I've only read about I now hear about first hand. Less complicated are basic needs and general wisdom. Everyone wants loving, harmonious relationships. Nobody is sheltered from having family issues. Spending more than you have leads to problems. Being healthy is a blessing. Having friends in times of need is critical for physical, spiritual, and emotional well-being.

The academic life for all its goodness can easily be one of myopic theory. Out here in the everyday life, people have substance, and they don't fit in boxes. They are unique individuals, made in the image of and specifically loved by our Creator. While I may one day get to spend more time in academia or more time with my favorite zoom lens, I'm glad to be in this season learning to see in these ways.