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.